English 
Literature 


NEWCOMER 


*jL  IaM^. 


Helen  UflmaR 
Routa  1,  Box  625 
long  Beach,  Cafif 


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ENGLISH  LITERATURE 


BY 

ALPHONSO  GERALD  NEWCOMER 

ASSOCIATE      PROFESSOR     OF     ENGLISH      IN      THE      LELAND      STANFORD 
JUNIOR     UNIVERSITY 


CHICAGO 
SCOTT,  FORESMAN  AND  COMPANY 

1907 


Copyright,  1905 

By 

SCOTT,  FOKESMAN  AND  COMPANY 


TYPOGRAPHY — PRESS\A/ORK —  Br  N  DINC 

ROBERT    O.    LAW    COMPANY 

CHICAGO,   I  LL. 


SRLF 


PREFACE. 

How  to  teach  literature  is  too  large  a  question  to  be  answered 
in  a  preface.  But  there  is  a  preliminary  question,  of  narrower 
scope,  which  the  author  would  like  to  urge  upon  every  teacher 
for  careful  consideration.  It  is  this:  What  shall  be  selected  for 
teaching  from  among  the  things  that  commonly  pass  for  lit- 
erature, and  what  proportionate  emphasis  shall  be  laid  on 
them  ?  How  much  history,  for  instance,  shall  be  included,  and 
how  much  biography  ?  Which  writers  shall  be  chosen  and  which 
omitted  ?  How  much  attention  shall  be  given  to  individuals  and 
how  much  to  general  movements;  how  much  stress  laid  on 
intellectual  analysis  and  how  much  on  emotional  or  sesthetic 
appreciation  ? 

The  author's  answer  is  generally,  though  not  always,  to 
be  found  in  the  method  of  this  book.  If  more  of  historical 
background  than  there  is  space  for  here  seem  desirable  it  can 
easily  be  filled  in  from  standard  histories.  But  so  long  as 
the  study  is  literature,  history  must  be  kept  duly  subordinate. 
There  is  no  need  to  make  history  supply  the  gaps  in  the  litera- 
ture itself  where  the  latter  is  meagre.  A  similar  caution  is 
applicable  to  biography.  The  modern  tendency  to  make  much 
of  this  element  is  on  the  whole  commendable.  But  the  fact 
that  biography  is  interesting  and  easily  taught  should  not  tempt 
one  to  exaggerate  its  importance;  biography,  like  history, 
is  not  literature.  It  is  pertinent  only  so  far  as  a  writer's  life  is 
directly  related  to,  or  serves  to  illuminate,  his  written  works. 
It  is  not  equally  needed  in  all  cases.  In  the  study  of  a  subjective, 
emotional  writer  like  Ruskin,  a  life-history  is  essential.  In  the 
study  of  a  dramatist  like  Shakespeare,  it  can  be  almost  wholly 
dispensed  with.     A  satirist  or  a  sentimentalist  requires  to  be 


6  ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

read  in  the  light  of  his  environment  and  temperament,  a  phil- 
osopher or  a  historian  much  less  so. 

The  particular  writers  to  be  selected  for  study  must  be 
determined  by  the  time  at  the  teacher's  disposal,  with  some  help, 
perhaps,  from  the  relative  emphajsis  accorded  them  in  this  book. 
Of  course,  the  selection  here  made,  which  inevitably  repre- 
sents a  personal  judgment,  will  not  satisfy  all  critics.  The 
author  has  endeavored  never  to  mention  a  writer  and  seldom 
a  work  without  some  accompanying  characterization  to  justify 
the  mention,  but  that  he  has  omitted  no  names  of  greater 
desert  than  some  that  are  included  he  would  be  foolhardy  to 
claim.  The  minor  names  may  be  passed  with  a  glance,  as 
serving  chiefly  the  purpose  of  perspective.  Among  the  major 
names  there  will  be  no  difficulty  of  choice,  for  the  major 
hierarchies  are  no  longer  in  dispute.  It  is  a  matter  for  more 
concern  that,  whatever  writers  are  studied,  the  student  be  sent 
directly  to  their  works.  To  this  end  no  such  description  of  a 
work  has  been  given  herein  as  might  seem  to  be  a  sufficient  sub- 
stitute for  the  work  itself.  Stories,  for  instance,  are  not  outlined 
or  retold.  But  wherever  space  permitted,  citations  have  been 
made,  as  much  with  a  view  to  alluring  the  student  to  read  the 
full  originals  as  for  the  sake  of  illustration. 

A  disproportion  in  treatment  that,  from  the  historical  point 
of  view,  is  not  critical,  will  be  noted  in  the  relatively  large 
space  given  to  nineteenth  century  writers.  The  reason  for 
this  disproportion  in  a  text-book  of  the  present  kind  should  be 
sufficiently  apparent  to  require  no  defence.  The  order  of  treat- 
ment must  likewise  be  its  own  justification.  The  safe  order 
of  chronology  has  been  adhered  to  as  far  as  is  consistent  with 
the  presentation  of  natural  groups  and  movements;  but  when 
several  chapters  cover  the  same  period,  as  the  three  chapters 
on  the  Elizabethan  age,  or  the  three  chapters  on  the  Victorian 
writers,  they  must  be  regarded  as  parallel,  not  as  consecutive. 
The  classified  topical  index,  which  precedes  the  general  index, 
will  be    of   much   assistance    in    studying   the  history  of    the 


PREFACE  7 

movements  themselves  and  allied  subjects,  especially  when 
these  cover  periods  so  great  that  their  treatment  is  necessarily 
scattered. 

As  for  the  aesthetic  appreciation  of  literature,  in  distinction 
from  colder  analysis,  the  author  is  firmly  of  the  opinion  that,  how- 
ever difficult  the  former  may  be  to  teach,  it  is  the  main  end  of  ele- 
mentary literary  study.  He  who  aims  at  scholarship  will  take 
a  different  view;  but  for  the  average  student,  the  chief  office  of 
I'terature  is  to  enrich  the  leisure  of  his  life.  A  text-book  based 
on  such  a  conception  need  not  assume  to  be  rigorously  critical; 
it  does  not  set  before  itself  the  object  of  enabling  students  to  sit 
in  absolutely  dispassionate  judgment  upon  the  works  they  are 
invited  to  enjoy.  The  author  is  therefore  prepared  to  hear 
with  equanimity  the  charge  that  he  has  sometimes  been  guilty 
of  over-praise.  At  the  same  time  he  trusts  that  no  panegyric 
has  been  lightly  evoked  or  mistakenly  bestowed, — that  even  his 
superlatives,  when  consideration  is  taken  of  the  qualifications 
that  attend  them  and  allowance  made  for  honest  differences  of 
opinion,  will  be  found  to  have  been  not  thoughtlessly  employed. 
To  be  appreciative  without  becoming  uncritical,  and  above  all 
without  losing  grasp  of  substance,  has  been  the  constant  aim. 
In  this,  as  in  the  companion  work  on  American  Literature, 
the  advice  and  criticism  of  Professor  Lindsay  Todd  Damon,  now 
of  Brown  University,  have  been  liberally  given  and  gladly  ac- 
cepted. In  a  few  instances  of  disagreement  upon  order  or 
inclusion,  or  upon  critical  estimates,  the  author  has  naturally 
felt  obliged  to  abide  by  his  own  judgment  and  exonerate  Pro- 
fessor Damon  from  any  share  of  blame.  The  portrait  of 
Queen  Elizabeth  and  the  illustrations  in  the  chapter  on  the 
Elizabethan  drama  are  taken  from  the  library  edition  of  Sidney 
Lee's  "Life  of  Shakespeare." 

A.  G.  N. 
Stanford  University,  Cal. 
June  1,  1905. 


COIVTENTS. 


Preface 5 

Introduction .        .        11 

PART  I.    OLD  ENGLISH  PERIOD. 

I.     Seventh    and    Eighth   Centuries  —  Northumbrian 

Ascendency 17 

II.    Ninth     to     Eleventh     Centuries — West    Saxon 

Ascendency 26 

PART  II.    MIDDLE  ENGLISH  PERIOD. 

III.  Twelfth  Century — Early  Norman-French   Infj  - 

ence 35 

IV.  Thirteenth  Century — Revival  of  English  .        38 
V.     Fourteenth  Century — Age  of  Chaucer            .         .    i3 

VI.     Fifteenth  Century — Passing  of  the  Middle  Age — 

Introduction  of  Printing       ....        62 

PART  HI.    MODERN  ENGLISH  PERIOD. 

VII.    Henry  VIII.  to  Elizabeth — The  New  Learning — 

The  Reformation 79 

Interchapter.     The    Elizabethan    Age  —  Age    of 

Spenser,  Shakf:speabe,  and  Bacon  .        .        85 

VIII.     Elizabethan  Poetry 89 

IX.     The  Elizabethan   Drama       .....        98 

X.    Elizabethan  Prose  .         ......     128 

9 


10  CONTENTS. 

.    XI.    Caroline  and  Puritan  Period — Age  of  Milton        135 
XII,    The  Restoration  and  the  Revolution — Age  of 

Drtden 155 

XIII.  Early  Eighteenth  Century — Age  of  the  Classi- 

cists       168 

XIV,  Eighteenth  Century — Rise  of  the  Novel  .    191 
XV.     Middle  and  Late  Eighteenth   Century — Age  of 

Johnson  and  Burke 205 

XVI.    Early   Nineteenth    Century — Age   of  Romanti- 
cism            232 

XVII.    Early  Nineteenth  Century — The  New  Prose  267 
XVIII.    The  Victorian  Age— Poetry         .        .        .        .283 

XIX,    The  Victorian  Novel 317 

XX.     Miscellaneous  Victorian  Prose           .        .        .  342 

XXI.    The  Later  Victorians 368 

Conclusion 387 

Appendix  A — Notes  on  the  Language  ....     392 

Appendix  B — 1.    Chronological  Chart  of  Principal  Writers  398 

2.  List  of  Minor  Authors  and  Their  Chief 

Works 400 

3.  Chronology  of  the  Works  of  Chaucer  and 

Shakespeare 407 

4.  Classified  Details  of  Biographical  and  Lit- 

erary Interest 408 

Appendix  C — L    Bibliography 414 

2.    Questions  and  Suggestions  for  Study  .        416 

Index 446 


INTRODUCTION 


The  position  occupied  by  the  EngUsh  people  among  the 
great  nations  of  the  modern  world  is  a  position  which  has  been 
won  by  more  than  fifteen  centuries  of  slow  progress  and  varied 
conflict.  The  record  of  the  outward  events  of  these  centuries 
is  the  fascinating  story  of  English  history.  The  more  spontane- 
ous record  of  the  inner  lives  of  the  men  and  women  who  made 
this  history,  of  their  reaction  upon  events  and  their  reflections 
upon  them,  of  their  social  needs  and  intellectual  aspirations,  is 
the  equally  fascinating  story  of  English  literature.  The  two 
records  run  side  by  side,  and  of  the  latter  in  particular  it  is 
not  possible  to  give  a  detailed  and  lucid  account  without  some 
preliminary  sketch  of  the  former. 

Two  thousand  years  ago  the  British  Isles  were  not  inhabited 
by  the  English  race.  When  Cffisar  landed  there,  fifty-five  years 
before  the  Christian  era,  he  found  »  Celtic  people — the  ancestors 
of  the  present  Welsh,  Irish,  and  Highland  Scotch.  Several  cen- 
turies of  Roman  rule  followed,  in  the  course  of  which  the  southern 
portion  of  these  people  were  partially  civilized  and  Romanized. 
But  early  in  the  fifth  century  the  Roman  legions,  needed  for  the 
defence  of  Rome  against  the  great  wave  of  barbarian  invasion 
from  the  North,  were  withdrawn.  Immediately  the  more  bar- 
barous tribes  to  the  west  and  north  began  to  press  southward, 
and  the  southern  Celts,  or  Britons  as  they  were  now  called,  had 
to  ask  certain  of  the  Teutonic  (Germanic)  tribes  dwelling  by  the 
coast  of  the  North  Sea  to  come  to  their  assistance.  These  wild 
sea-rovers,  who  had  long  harassed  the  British  shores,  kept  at  bay 
only  by  the  Roman  power,  were  ready  enough  to  come.  But  once 
they  had  secured  a  foothold,  it  was  not  long  before  they  turned 
against  their  British  allies  and  permanently  established  them- 
selves in  power.     This,  in  short,  was  the  English  Conquest, 


12  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

♦?hich  made  Britain  England.  It  dates  from  the  landing  of 
Ilengist  and  Horsa  about  449. 

Through  the  years  that  follow  we  may  trace  the  records 
with  varying  distinctness.  On  the  one  hand,  we  get  glimpses 
of  the  struggling  British  chieftains  as  they  were  slowly  pressed 
westward  by  their  new  enemies.  On  the  other  hand,  we  see  that 
among  the  conquerors  themselves  there  was  by  no  means  political 
unity.  Three  different  tribes  had  come  from  the  shores  of  the 
German  ocean: — the  Jutes,  who  settled  in  the  extreme  southeast; 
the  Saxons,  who  occupied  the  banks  of  the  Thames  and  most  of 
the  region  to  the  south  and  west;  and  the  Angles,  who  seized  all 
the  northward  portion,  "North  Humber  Land."  The  Angles 
were  the  first  to  erect  a  powerful  kingdom,  and  it  was  in  North- 
umbria  that  a  literature  was  first  cultivated.*  But  in  the  eighth 
and  ninth  centuries  the  Northumbrian  ascendency  was  lost. 
The  kingdom  was  torn  with  a  civil  strife  that  reduced  it  to  an- 
archy, and  the  Danes,  who  came  with  a  fresh  barbarian  irruption 
from  the  continent,  found  it  an  easy  prey.  The  leadership 
among  the  English  passed  to  the  West  Saxon  kingdom  in  the 
south  under  Ecgberht  (802),  whose  grandson,  iElfred,  succeeded 
a  little  later  in  checking  the  Danes.  Altogether  the  Saxon  su- 
premacy lasted  for  about  a  century  and  a  half;  then  the  Dane 
conquered  Wessex,  too,  and  was  for  a  short  while  master.  A 
period  was  put  to  this  era  in  1066  by  the  Norman  Conquest, 
which  brought  new  elements  into  the  race  and  ultimately  into  the 
language,  unified  the  diverse  interests,  and  founded  the  later 
line  of  kings. 

Such,  in  bare  outline,  is  England's  early  history.     The  story 

of  her  language  we  must  also  glance  at.     The  various  dialects  of 

the  tribes  who  came  from  the  continent  constituted  a  Teutonic 

language  of  the  Low  German  group — a  tongue,  that  is,  spoken 

by  the  dwellers  in  the  lowland  and  coast  region  extending  from 

*  Hence  the  name  England  (Engla  land,  Angle-land).  The  late  Greeks 
had  called  the  island  Albion,  and  the  Koinans  Britannia.  The  name  Kritain  was 
revived  about  the  time  of  Henry  VIII.  in  connection  with  the  efforts  made  to 
unite  England  and  Scotland.  In  160 1  James  I.  was  proclaimed  "  King  of  Great 
Britain." 


INTRODUCTION  13 

the  mouth  of  the  Rhine  northeastward.  Its  most  direct  descend- 
ants outside  of  England  to-day  are  Frisian  and  Dutch.  Modern 
German,  descended  from  the  High  German  group,  stands  at  a 
slightly  further  remove.  The  language  as  it  was  first  used  in 
England,  we  now  call  by  the  name  of  Old  English.  There  were 
three  or  four  dialects,  corresponding  to  the  different  tribes : — the 
Anglian,  which  was  spoken  in  the  north;  the  West  Saxon  (later 
called  the  Southern),  used  by  the  Saxons  in  the  south;  and  the 
Kentish,  used  by  the  Jutes.  The  Anglian  may  be  further  sub- 
divided into  the  Xorthumbrian,  of  the  extreme  north,  and  the 
Mercian  (later  known  as  the  Midland).  Only  the  Anglian,  in 
its  two  divisions,  and  the  West  Saxon  were  prominent,  whence 
the  name  Anglo-Saxon  has  sometimes  been  used  for  Old  English. 
But  as  the  name  English  was  early  used  even  by  the  Saxons 
themselves,  owing  to  the  prior  ascendency  of  the  Anglian  people 
and  the  Northumbrian  dialect,  it  has  the  stronger  claim.  It  was 
not  the  Northumbrian  dialect,  however,  that  was  destined  to  grow 
into  modern  English.  It  was  first  supplanted  in  literary  suprem- 
acy by  the  West  Saxon,  when  the  latter  kingdom  rose  to  power. 
Then  the  supremacy  was  finally  transferred  to  the  Mercian,  or 
IMidland,  the  dialect  spoken  in  and  about  London,  the  capital 
city.  This  took  place  about  the  fourteenth  century,  which 
makes  it  evident  that  the  whole  question  of  dialects  is  one  that 
concerns  philology  rather  than  literature.  For  in  the  early  cen- 
turies the  amount  of  writing  having  a  literary  value  was  compara- 
tively small;  and  since  the  invention  of  printing,  literature  has 
naturally  sought  a  common  dialect — the  language  of  the  learned. 
Exceptions  in  the  later  literature  are  to  be  found  only  here  and 
there,  as  in  the  native  Scotch  poetry  of  Burns,  the  imitative  dialect 
poems  of  Tennyson,  or  the  character  sketches  of  modern  fiction. 
Looking  at  the  English  language  as  a  whole,  however,  we 
find  other  considerations  of  importance.  We  observe  that 
the  framework  of  it  remains  to  this  day  Teutonic;  its  affinity  with 
the  German  language  may  be  easily  traced  in  the  words  of  the  old 
native  stock  —the  numerals,  for  instance,  the  pronouns,  preposi- 


14  ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

tions,  and  conjunctions,  and  the  simpler,  more  usual  nouns, 
adjectives,  and  verbs.  But  the  vocabulary  has  been  materially 
changed  and  enlarged  by  many  influences.  A  few  Celtic  words 
were  picked  up.  Latin  influence  was  felt  from  the  time  of 
the  conversion  of  the  English  to  Christianity  at  the  end  of  the 
sixth  century.  The  incursions  of  the  Danes  brought  a  slight 
Norse  element.  Then  came  the  Norman  conquest  in  1066, 
marked  before  and  after  by  a  decided  French,  or  Romance,  influ- 
ence. Finally,  four  centuries  later,  with  the  revival  of  classical 
learning,  the  I^atin  influence  received  a  new  impetus,  and  a 
Greek  influence  was  added.  Since  then  English  has  gone  steadily 
on,  making  new  words  for  its  new  needs  from  these  dead  lan- 
guages and  borrowing  freely  from  a  score  of  living  ones,  to  build 
up  the  exceedingly  composite  tongue  which  is  spoken  and  writ- 
ten to-day.* 

The  two  events  just  referred  to,  the  Danish  and  Norman 
conquests  in  the  eleventh  century,  and  the  Renaissance  or  revival 
of  learning  in  the  fifteenth  and  sixteenth  centuries,  both  of 
which,  as  indicated,  were  accompanied  by  important  linguistic 
changes,  serve  to  divide  the  entire  history  of  the  language  and  its 
literature  into  three  pretty  clearly  defined  periods: 

I.     The  Old  English  (or  Anglo-Saxon)  Period,  extending 

to  about  1100. 
II.     The  Middle  EngHsh  Period,  extending  from  1100  to 

about  1500. 
III.     The  Modern  English  Period,  extending  from  1500  to 

the  present  time. 
In  the  present  book  the  modern  period  will  be  further  sub- 
divided, on  other  than  linguistic  grounds.  Of  course  the  great 
bulk  of  the  literature  comes  in  this  period;  yet  the  second  enrolls 
one  of  the  highest  names  in  English  poetry,  Chaucer;  and  the 
first,  though  now  so  remote  that  its  language  looks  more  like  a 
foreign  language  than  our  native  tongue,  contains  both  matter 
of  historical  value  and  some  very  worthy  poetry. 
♦See  Appendix. 


PART  I 

OLD  ENGLISH  PERIOD 

FROM  THE  BEGINNING  TO  THE 
NORMAN  CONQUEST 

C.  670-1066 


»/I 


Beowulf 

Mohammed:  The 

C^DMON 

Koran 

BEDE 

Haroun-al-Rashid 

CYNEWULF 

Charlemagne 

CHAPTER  I 

SEVENTH   AND   EIGHTH   CENTURIES — NORTHUMBRIAN 
ASCENDENCY 

The  English  land  in  Britain . .  .449 

Augustine  convei-ts  Kent 597 

Eadwine  king  of  Northumbria  en 

./Ethelred  king  of  Mercia 675 

First  landing  of  Danes 7«7         1  I 

So  far  as  the  remains  show,  the  literature  of  England  was 
the  earliest  among  the  literatures  of  northern  Europe  to  reach 
an  advanced  stage  of  development.  It  is  not  now  possible  to 
determine  just  how  far  back  we  may  push  its  beginnings.  No 
existing  manuscript  can  be  dated  earlier  than  the  seventh  century 
and  very  few  earlier  than  the  eleventh.*  But  of  the  more  than 
twenty  thousand  lines  of  poetry  that  have  come  down  from  the 
Old  English  period  there  are  poems  which  from  their  character 
we  know  must  have  begun  to  take  shape  very  early,  poems,  in- 
deed, that  in  some  part  must  have  been  brought  by  the  Angles 
and  Saxons  from  their  home  beyond  the  North  Sea.  The  most 
famous  of  these,  and  the  one  which  is  in  every  way  the  most 
worthy  of  study,  is  Beovml],  now  admitted  to  be  the  oldest  pre- 
se^^'ed  epic  of  the  Teutonic  race. 

The  poem  has  had  a  remarkable  history.     It  points  unmis- 

•The  surviving  remains  of  Old  English  poetry  are  chiefly  contained  in  four 
manuscripts:  (1)  The  JunianMS.,  in  the  Bodleian  Library  at  Oxford,  contain- 
ing the  ParapAra«6»  attributed  to  Caedmon  (seep.  23).  (2)  The  CottonianMS., 
probably  of  the  tenth  century,  containing  Beowulf  and  Judith.  (3)  The  very 
important  Exeter  Book,  given  by  Bishop  Leofric  to  his  cathedral  church  at 
Exeter  about  1050,  containing  among  other  things  the  poems  called  Crist,  The 
Phcenix,  The  Wanderer,  The  Seafarer,  Riddles,  Deor's  Lament,  and  the  poem  that 
is  accounted  the  very  oldest  in  the  literature,  Widsith.  (4)  The  Vercelli  Book, 
discovered  at  Vercelli.  Italy,  and  made  known  in  1833,  containing  homilies  and 
half  a  dozen  poems,  among  them  The  Dream  of  the  Hood. 

n 


18  SEVENTH   AND   EIGHTH  CENTURIES 

takably  to  a  continental  origin,  and  yet,  while  parallels  are  not 
lacking,  direct  traces  of  the  tale  are  hard  to  find  in  the  lore  of  the 
continental  peoples.  It  came  out  of  the  darkness 
and  almost  returned  to  the  darkness  whence  it  came. 
For  nearly  a  thousand  years  it  lay  virtually  buried, 
while  English  literature  evolved  its  Chaucer,  its  Shakespeare, 
and  its  Milton.  In  1705  the  single  manuscript  known  to  be 
extant  was  brought  to  light,  narrowly  to  escape  perishing  by  fire 
a  few  years  later.  When  in  1815  it  was  at  length  published,  its 
true  character  and  value  were  recognized.  Though  it  was  prob- 
ably cast  into  its  present  form,  and  possibly  by  one  singer,  about 
the  year  700,  the  several  episodes  which  make  up  the  tale  may 
have  been  the  common  property  of  the  singers,  or  "gleemen," 
for  many  years  before.  The  gleeman,  it  should  be  understood, 
was  a  professional  minstrel  whose  duty  it  was  to  furnish  song 
and  music  at  the  feast.  He  was  only  a  musician  and  is  to  be 
distinguished  from  the  actual  composer  of  a  poem,  the  scoji,  or 
"shaper,"  though  sometimes,  of  course,  composer  and  singer 
were  one  and  the  same  person.  In  any  case  the  professional 
minstrel  would  exercise  more  or  less  liberty  in  changing  and 
adapting  the  songs  he  sang,  and  a  song  of  any  length  might  well 
be  the  product  of  slow  development  through  several  generations. 
It  is  thus  impossible  to  assert  with  confidence  the  single  author- 
ship of  a  poem  like  Beowulj. 

It  is  a  heroic  poem,  recounting  the  deeds  of  Beowulf,  a 
prince  of  the  Swedish  tribe  known  as  the  Geats.  The  scene  is 
laid  among  the  Danes  of  the  island  of  Seeland,  and  the  Geats. 
Hrothgar,  king  of  the  Danes,  is  pictured  as  reigning  among 
his  liegemen  in  the  great  mead-hall,  Heorot,  "hall  of  the  hart- 
antlers."  But  his  joy  is  marred  by  the  ravages  of  a  monster  of 
the  fens,  Grendel,  who  comes  nightly  to  slaughter  and  devour 
his  thanes.  There  is  a  brief  description  of  the  deeds  of  this  ter- 
rible "stalker  of  the  heath:" 

"Forth  then  he  sallied,  soon  as  the  night  fell. 
To  visit  the  high  built  hall  of  the  Ring-Danes, 


BEOWULF  19 

And  see  how  they  fared  there  after  the  beer-feast. 

He  found  therein  a  band  of  retainers 

Drowsy  with  drinking:  they  dreamed  not  of  sorrow, 

Misfortunes  of  men.     The  monster  of  evil, 

Grim  and  greedy,  fell  straight  to  work, 

Hideous,  horrible,  and  seized  in  their  slumber 

Thrice  ten  thane-men.     Then  he  made  off, 

Glutted  and  gloating,  to  return  to  his  lair. 

Sated  with  slaughter,  to  win  again  homeward." 

Beowulf  in  Sweden  hears  of  the  deeds  of  Grendel,  and  with  four- 
teen Geats  hurries  across  the  sea  to  Hrothgar's  assistance.  The 
landing  is  made  and  their  approach  duly  heralded. 

'  'The  way  was  bright  with  glittering  pebbles, 
The  path  that  guided  them.     Gleamed  the  byrnie, 
Hard  and  hand-riveted ;  the  bright  iron  rings 
Sang  in  the  armor,  as  on  to  the  mead-hall 
In  battle-gear  they  fared  together. 
Weary  of  the  sea,  they  set  their  great  shields. 
Strong-built  bucklers,  against  the  house-wall. 
And  with  clanking  of  byrnies,  the  harness  of  heroes, 
Sat  down  on  the  benches." 

So,  in  alternate  narration  and  description,  with  speech-making 
and  drinking  and  gift-giving,  with  battle-cry  and  funeral  wail, 
the  story  runs  through  three  thousand  tumultuous  lines.  Gren- 
del is  slain,  and  Grendel's  mother;  and  Beowulf  returns  to  the 
land  of  the  Geats  where  he  is  made  king  and  reigns  for  fifty 
years,  dying  at  last  in  a  victorious  fight  with  a  fire-dragon. 

The  language  of  this  poem — the  Old  English,  or  Anglo- 
Saxon — can  be  read  to-day  only  after  considerable  study, 
though  its  likeness  to  modern  English  is  apparent. 

Wado  weallende,  wedera  cealdost, 

Nipende  niht,  and  nor5an  wind, 

Hea(5o-grim  andhwcarf.     Hreo  wseron  y9a; 

Wajs  mere-fixa  mod  onhr^red.* 

*  When  the  Roman  alphabet  was  adopted,  two  sounds  not  found  In  that 
alphabet  were  still  represented  bj' the  old  runes  "thorn  "  and  "wen",/»  (th\ 
and/>  (w).  The  latter  is  no  longer  employed  in  printed  texts,  w  being  substi- 
tuted; and  for  the  former  the  character,  d{=dil)  is  commonly  substituted 
between  vowels  and  at  the  end  of  a  word.  A  survival  of  the  former  character 
may  still  occasionally  be  seen  in  the  archaic  ye  for  the. 


20  .  SEVENTH   AND   EIGHTH  CENTURIES 

'  'Weltering  waves,  coldest  of  weathers, 
Darkening  night,  and  a  north  wind, 
Cruelly  beat  on  us.     Rough  were  the  billows; 
The  mood  of  the  sea-monsters  was  aroused." 

The  metrical  scheme  is  that  of  all  Old  English  verse,  being 
timed  by  accents,  or  stressed  syllables,  with  the  accents  reinforced 
by  beginning-rh}Tne,  or  alliteration.  Each  line  is  divided  by  a 
pause  into  two  half-lines.  Each  half-line  has  two  strong  stresses, 
together  with  light  syllables  irregularly  distributed.  The  first 
strong  syllable  of  the  second  half-line  is  the  rhyme-giver,  and 
with  it  one,  or  more  regularly  both,  of  the  stressed  syllables  of  the 
first  half-line  alliterate.  The  first  two  lines  of  the  specimen  just 
given,  with  alliteration  in  w  and  n,  are  good  examples.  There 
are  frequent  variations,  however,  from  this  normal  type.  A 
further  technical  feature  of  the  poetry  is  what  is  known  as  paral- 
lelism, the  frequent  repetition  of  a  thought  in  different  words. 
Several  instances  may  be  noted  in  the  translations  given.  These 
characteristics,  so  useful  in  assisting  the  memory,  were  but 
natural  at  a  period  when  poetry  was  transmitted  orally,  and,  as 
was  said  above,  usually  to  the  accompaniment  of  music. 

Beowulf,  then,  takes  its  place  as  a  poem  evolved  out  of  the 
early  conditions  of  Teutonic  society,  and  as  a  poem  which  more 
completely  than  any  other  single  work  of  art  explicitly  reveals 
those  conditions.  It  stands  a  singularly  worthy  monument  to 
the  genius  of  its  lost  creator.  Though  it  has  a  few  Christian 
elements,  the  accretions  of  the  period  subsequent  to  the  Chris- 
tianizing of  the  English,  it  is  essentially  the  product  of  a  race 
that  as  yet  knew  nothing  of  Rome  or  Palestine,  a  race  still 
worshipping  the  powers  of  Nature,  the  gods  of  Strife  and 
Thunder  and  Darkness.  The  concrete  yet  wild  northern 
imagination  is  visible  in  its  direct  metaphorical  compounds ;  wild 
deer  are  "heath-rangers,"  human  bodies  are  "bone-prisons," 
ships  are  "sea-goers,"  or  "wave-riders,"  or  "foamy-necked 
floaters"  over  the  "  whale' s-path,"  the  night  is  a  "shadow-helm," 
the  sun  is  a  "candle  of  heaven."     The  whole  poem  is  alive  with 


BEOWULF  Qo^Qinia  21 

a  spirit  of  hardy  adventure;  it  resounds  with  the  noise  of  feasting 
and  banter,  and  with  the  ring  of  swords  upon  coats  of  mail; 
while  around  and  over  its  human  drama  of  gross  appetites  and 
restless  passions  are  those  breeders  of  strange  superstitions,  the 
mist-exhalations  of  the  northern  moorlands  and  the  mysterious 
voices  of  wind  and  sea. 

In  the  light  of  all  that  we  know  of  modern  English  literature, 
it  is  impossible  not  to  see  the  significance  of  these  things.  Here 
already  is  that  sensitiveness  to  nature,  in  her  power  and  her 
beauty  alike,  that  has  invariably  come  to  the  surface  along  with 
all  that  is  best  in  English  poetry,  whether  it  be  in  Chaucer  or 
Shakespeare,  Wordsworth  or  Tennyson.  More  especially,  here 
are  that  love  of  the  sea  and  pride  in  the  mastery  of  it  that  have 
constituted,  both  in  history  and  in  song,  one  of  the  chief  enduring 
glories  of  the  "sea-girt  isle."  It  is  the  same  thing  that  we  find 
throbbing  through  the  lines  of  the  ballad  of  Sir  Patrick  Spens,  sur- 
rounding with  a  magic  spell  Prospero's  isle  in  The  Tempest,  invest- 
ing itself  with  romantic  color  in  The  Ancient  Mariner,  or  rising 
into  the  region  of  spiritual  symbolism  in  Crossing  the  Bar.  There 
is  the  same  myth-making  faculty  at  work, which  still  reads  life  and 
intelligence  into  natural  forces.  These  forces,  to  a  people  who 
reckoned  their  years  by  winters  and  their  weeks  by  nights,  ap- 
peared stern  and  sombre,  and  the  creatures  of  their  imagina- 
tion were  correspondingly  fierce  and  malign, — fire-demons,  and 
frost-giants,  and  half-human  Grendel-monsters  of  the  marsh- 
mists  and  the  sea.  In  later  times,  under  Christian  influence, 
and  through  contact  with  Celtic  folk-lore,  the  monsters  gave 
place  to  kindlier  spirits.  But  the  fancy  that  creates  them  has 
worked  with  its  old  activity,  giving  us  beautiful  Faerie  Queenes 
and  Midsummer  Night's  Dreams.  There  are  fairy-tales  even 
yet,  and  fairies  so  bold  as  to  play  their  pranks  in  the  heart  of 
modern  London.*  Thus  in  the  strains  of  a  nation's  poetry  no 
less  than  in  the  sounds  of  its  speech  or  the  complexions  of  its 
people,  are  descent  and  kinship  declared. 
» J.  M.  Barrle:  The  Little  White  Bird. 


22  SEVENTH  AND  EIGHTH  CENTURIES 

Of  other  poems  of  this  early  period,  mostly  fragmentary, — 
of  Widsith,  for  instance,  the  Ulyssean  "Far-Traveller,"  or  of  the 
Achillean  Fight  at  Finnsburg, — there  is  no  space  here  to  speak. 
It  is  enough  to  have  described  the  chief  literary  monument  of 
our  pagan  era.  Christianity  was  at  hand,  and  was  beginning 
to  color  even  these  pagan  records.  For  after  the  English  had 
finally  established  their  power  in  Britain,  Rome  came  again, 
but  this  time  in  peaceful  guise.  In  597,  Augustine  and 
his  band  of  forty  monks  landed  among  the  Jutes  in  Kent 
and  took  up  residence  in  Canterbury.  As  the  religion  they 
brought  spread  northward,  the  old  nature-worship  went  down 
before  it.  Churches  sprang  up;  monasteries  were  founded. 
Latin  was  reintroduced  as  the  language  of  the  Church  and  of 
learning,  and  the  way  was  prepared  for  the  ultimate  union  of 
northern  genius  and  southern  art  in  one  of  the  most  splendid 
literatures  of  modern  times. 

It  is  to  Christianized  England  that  Caedmon  belongs,  the 
man  with  whose  name  is  associated  the  first  recorded  bit  of 
English  literary  history.  The  story  runs  that  in 
„  „- J  '  the  latter  half  of  the  seventh  century,  near  the 
monastery  of  the  Abbess  Ilild,  at  Whitby,  on  the 
wild  Northumbrian  coast,  there  lived  a  man  who  could  not 
sing,  and  who,  when  the  harp  went  round  at  the  feast,  was  wont 
to  leave  the  banquet-hall  in  shame.  One  night,  when  he  had 
fled  thus  to  the  stables  where  he  tended  the  horses  and  oxen,  he 
fell  asleep,  and  some  one  appeared  to  him  in  a  vision,  saying: 
"Caedmon,  sing  to  me."  "What  shall  I  sing?"  he  replied. 
"Sing  of  the  beginning  of  the  created  world."  So  he  sang,  and 
awaking  he  remembered  the  song,  and  made  others  like  it. 
The  Abbess  Hild,  we  are  further  told,  received  Caedmon  into 
the  monastery,  where  the  Holy  Scriptures  were  explained  to 
him  by  the  learned  men,  and  he  thereafter  employed  his  gift 
in  turning  them  into  poetry. 

Unfortunately  we  cannot  be  certain  that  any  of  this  work 
has  survived.     An   Old  English   MS.,   found  and  printed  in 


BEDE  ,    .     23 

Milton's  time,  contains  a  metrical  paraphrase  of  the  book  of 
Genesis  and  two  poems  entitled  Exodus  and  Daniel,  which 
answer  fairly  well  to  the  description  of  Csedmon's  hymns;  and 
scholars  have  with  some  confidence  ascribed  the  older  portions 
of  the  Genesis  to  him.  Again,  in  the  same  MS.  with  Beowul], 
is  a  highly  dramatic  version  of  the  Biblical  story*of  Judith  which 
has  naturally  suggested  Csedmon's  authorship,  though  the 
possibility  has  been  nearly  disproved.  It  is  a  matter  of  little 
consequence.  We  believe  that  a  Csedmon  lived  and  sang; 
and  we  know  that  we  possess,  in  the  better  parts  of  these  poems, 
further  proof  of  the  vigor  and  imaginative  power  of  Old  Eng- 
lish poetry.  For  there  is  more  in  the  poems  than  mere  para- 
phrase. The  waters  of  the  Deluge,  for  instance,  are  pictured 
as  a  veritable  raging  ocean  with  the  ark  riding  over  them  "at 
large  under  the  skies."  What  in  the  Bible  is  merely  a  sugges- 
tion of  a  battle  is  expanded  in  the  poem  into  a  fierce  and  drama- 
tic conflict.  The  fall  of  Lucifer  and  his  angels  is  vividly  des- 
cribed : — 

"Therefore  in  worse  light 
Under  the  Earth  beneath,  Almighty  God 
Had  placed  them  triumphless  in  the  swart  Hell. 
There  evening,  immeasurably  long, 
Brings  to  each  fiend  renewal  of  the  fire ; 
Then  comes,  at  dawn,  the  east  wind,  keen  with  frost 
Its  dart,  or  fire  continual,  torments  sharp." 

(Translation  by  Henry  Morley.) 

Not  a  few  resemblances  to  this  part  may  be  found  in  Paradise 
Lost,  and  it  is  quite  possible  that  Milton  knew  of  the  poem. 

Baeda,  the  "venerable  Bede,"  a  writer  of  prose,  must  take  a 
place  by  the  side  of  Ciedmon  with  the  progenitors  of  our  litera- 
ture.    He  too,  was  a  Northumbrian,  born  about  the 
. '  year  673.     He  spent  his  life  in  the  monastery  at  Jar- 

row,  near  the  mouth  of  the  Tyne,  always,  in  his  own 
words,  "taking  delight  in  learning,  teaching,  and  writing."  The 
most  prolific  source  of  our  knowledge  of  the  earlier  history  of 
Britain  is  his  Ecclesiastical  History,  which  gives  a  concise  ac- 


24  SEVENTH   AND  EIGHTH   CENTURIES 

count  from  the  landing  of  Caesar  and  a  detailed  relation  from 
the  advent  of  Augustine.  It  is  from  this  history  that  we  draw 
the  story  of  Csedmon.  But  the  influence  of  Bede  upon  our  na- 
tive literature  was  an  indirect  one,  since  his  works,  like  nearly 
all  the  prose  of  the  period,  were  written  in  Latin;  it  is  only  after 
Alfred  had  iher  History  translated  into  the  West  Saxon  tongue 
that  that  book  becomes  an  English  classic. 

The  desire  to  attach  to  ancient  poems  an  author's  name  and 
history,  and  so  in  some  manner  to  visualize  the  poet,  is  an  exceed- 
ingly natural  one.  It  Mas  therefore  with  much  sat- 
n^'O?  isfaction  that  in  several  Old  English  poems  the 
author's  name  was  discovered  spelled  out  in  runes, 
after  the  manner  of  an  acrostic.  This  name  was  Cynewulf. 
History  has  been  vainly  appealed  to  for  further  light.  But  by 
ascribing,  on  various  grounds,  certain  other  poems  to  the  same 
author,  and  putting  together  the  hints  they  contain,  a  story  has 
been  made  out  for  him.  Cynewulf  was  in  all  probability  a 
Northumbrian  of  the  eighth  century,  and  he  may  well  have  spent 
his  youth  in  gaiety  as  a  wondering  scop.  That  he  composed  any 
of  the  numerous  Riddles*  attributed  to  him  is  extremely  doubtful. 
Neither  can  we  know  that  he  was  the  author  of  the  really  beauti- 
ful allegory  of  the  resurrection  of  Christ,  The  Phoenix.  The 
one  thing  certain  is  that  he  composed  the  three  poems  known 
as  Crist,  Juliana,  and  Elene,  the  last-named  at  a  time  when,  as 
he  laments,  his  youth  had  fled  and  he  was  smitten  with  sorrow. 
These  are  all  religious  poems;  the  two  latter  are  legends  of  saints. 
The  first  is  a  long  poem  in  three  sections,  depicting  the  three 

♦Riddles,  often  distinctly  native  in  character,  though  perhaps  first  imitated 
from  Latin  enigmas  in  hexameter  verse,  were  a  curious  by-product  of  our  early 
literature.    The  following  is  an  example: 

"  Netherward  my  neb  is  set,  deep  inclined  I  fare; 
And  along  the  ground  I  grub,  going  as  he  guideth  me 
Who  the  hoary  foe  of  the  holt  is,  and  the  Head  of  me. 
Forward  bent  he  walks,  he,  the  warden  at  my  tail ; 
Through  the  meadows  pushes  me,  moves  me  on  and  presses  me, 
Sows  upon  my  spoor.    I  myself  in  haste  am  then. 

Green  upon  one  side  is  my  ganging  on; 
Swart  upon  the  other  surely  is  my  path." 

(Translation  by  Stopford  Brooke.) 
The  answer  is :    A  Plow. 


CYNEWULF  25 

comings  of  Christ — the  Nativity,  the  Ascent  into  Heaven,  and 
the  final  Coming  to  Judgment. 

"Lo,  Thou  art  the  wall-stone  which  erst  the  workmen 
From  the  work  rejected.     Beseemeth  thee  well 
That  Thou  shouldst  be  head  of  the  hall  of  glory." 

The  Judgment  is  portrayed  in  especially  vivid  language: 

"The  dusky  flame  shall  fare  through  earth 
Like  a  raging  warrior.     Where  once  flowed  the  waters, 
The  billowy  floods,  in  a  bath  of  fire 
Shall  the  sea-fishes   bum.      ..... 

Water  shall  burn  as  wax.       ...... 

There  shall  be  cry  and  moan,  and  strife  of  the  living, 
Mingling  of  wailing  with  the  welkin's  roar." 

The  poem  is  permeated  with  pure  religious  fen'or  and  may 

stand  as  a  type  of  the  Christian  poetr\'  which  marks  the  close  of 

the  period  of  literar}-  activity  in  Northumbria.* 

•  Not  till  near  the  time  of  Dunbar,  In  1500.  does  this  North  English  dialect  rise 
again  to  literary  importance.  (See  chapter  VI.,  and  Appendix.)  Then,  and 
thenceforward,  the  language  with  its  literature  is  known  as  Scotch,  and  to  it 
may  be  said  to  belong  the  still  later  native  dialect  poetry  of  Ramsay  and  Bums, 
and  even  some  of  the  fiction  of  our  own  day. 


CHAPTER  II 


NINTH   TO     ELEVENTH    CENTURIES — WEST     SAXON    ASCENDENCY 


Ecgberht  of  Wessex  overlord 

of  all  English  kingdoms . .  .828 
.Alfred  king  of  Wessex..  ..871 -HOI 

Cnut  the  Dane  king lOie-JOSS 

Eadward  the  Confessor ..  1042- loao 
Harold  defeated  at  Hastings  1060 


KING  ALFRED 

Anglo-Saxon 
Chronicle 

^LFBIC 


Verse   Edda 
Chansons  de  Gesfc 


Rather  curiously,  all  this  Northumbrian  literature  which 
we  have  been  describing  has  come  down  to  us,  not  in  the  original 
Northern,  but  in  the  West  Saxon,  or  Southern,  dialect.  This 
is  due  to  the  southward  shifting  of  power,  which,  as  already 
stated,  took  place  in  the  eighth  and  ninth  centuries.  As  the 
Danes  poured  in  year  after  year,  overrunning  especially  the 
weakened  Northumbria,  homesteads  and  churches  were  burnt, 
monasteries  with  their  libraries  were  sacked,  and  all  that  had 
been  accomplished  in  government,  art,  and  literature,  threatened 
to  disappear.  It  was  Wessex,  already  grown  to  strength  under 
Ecgberht,  that  finally  succeeded  in  staying  for  a  time  this  Danish 
conquest,  and  the  chief  credit  for  it  belongs  to  one  man,  the 
grandson  of  Ecgberht,  iElfred,  or,  as  we  know  him.  King  Alfred 
the   Great. 

Great  as  a  warrior  and  statesman,  Alfred  was  no  less  great 
as  a  scholar  and  patron  of  learning.  He  came  to  the  throne  in 
871  and  within  seven  years  forced  peace  from  the 
Alfred  the  turbulent  and  ever  encroaching  Danes.  Then,  in 
S49-qni  ^^^^^  respite  as  he  could  snatch  from  his  "  various  and 
manifold  worldly  cares,"  he  addressed  himself  to  the 
labor  of  rekindling  the  dying  flame  of  learning.  He  gathered 
about  him  scholars  and  founded  schools  and  abbeys;  he  worked 

26 


ALFRED  THE   GREAT 


27 


to  restore  Christian  culture,  and  to  rescue  the  perishing  fragments 
of  our  literature.  For  himself  he  set  the  task  of  translating  some 
of  the  great  books  of  the  world  into  the  dialect  of  his  people.  In 
this  way  we  have  as  the  work  of  his  own  hand  a  large  body  of 
Old  English  prose : — the  Pastoral  Care  of  Pope  Gregory  the  Great, 
a  manual  for  the  clergy;  the  Ecclesiastical  History"^  of  Bede, 
English  annals,  thus  brought 
within  reach  of  all  English 
readers;  a  History  of  the 
World  by  the  Spanish  monk 
Orosius,  then  the  standard 
text-book  of  general  history; 
and  the  Consolation  of  Phil- 
osophy by  Boethius.  The  last 
is  his  greatest  legacy;  for  it 
is  much  more  than  a  transla- 
tion— it  is  a  free  paraphrase, 
containing  entire  pages  of 
original  matter,  and  revealing 
everywhere  the  hand  and  soul 
of  Alfred  the  Great. 

E>8et  bi9  ponne  cyninges 
andweorc  and  his  tol  mid  to 
ricsianne,  pset  he  haebbe  his 
lond  full  mannod.  He  sceal 
hsebban  gebedmen  and  fyrd- 
men  and  weorcmen,  etc. 

"This,  then,  is  a  king's  ma- 
terials   and  his  tools  to  reign 

with:  that  he  have  his  land  well  peopled;  he  must  have  prayer-men, 
and  soldiers,  and  workmen.  Thou  knowest  that  without  these  tools 
no  king  can  show  his  craft.  This  is  also  his  materials  which  he  must 
have  besides  the  tools:  provisions  for  the  three  classes.  This  is, 
then,  their  provision:  land  to  inhabit,  and  gifts,  and  weapons,  and 
meat,  and  ale,  and  clothes,  and  whatsoever  is  necessary  for  the  three 


STATUE  OB'  ALFRED  THE  GREAT. 


•It  is  not  quite  certain  that  the  translation  of  this  should  be  attributed 
to  Alfred  himself ;  even  if  not,  it  was  done  under  bis  direction. 


28  NINTH  TO  ELEVENTH  CENTURIES 

classes.  He  cannot  without,  these  preserve  the  tools,  nor  without 
the  tools  accomplish  any  of  those  things  which  he  is  commanded 
to  perform.  Therefore  I  was  desirous  of  materials  wherewith  to 
exercise  the  power,  that  my  talents  and  power  should  not  be  for- 
gotten and  concealed.  For  every  craft  and  every  power  soon  be- 
comes old,  and  is  passed  over  in  silence,  if  it  be  without  wisdom; 
for  no  man  can  accomplish  any  craft  without  wisdom.  Because 
whatsoever  is  done  through  folly,  no  one  can  ever  reckon  for  craft. 
This  is  now  especially  to  be  said :  that  I  wished  to  live  honorably 
whilst  I  lived,  and  after  my  life  to  leave  to  the  men  who  were 
after  me  my  memory  in  good  works. ' ' 

(Translation  by  Samtiel  Fox.) 

The  Anglo-Saxon  Chronicle,  a  still  greater  monument  of 

Old  English  prose,  belongs  also  to  Alfred's  reign,  in  the  sense 

.     ,  that  the  literary  influence  of  his  court  at  Winchester 

Anglo-  '' 

Saxon  ^^^  doubtless  much  to  do  with  the  compilation  of  it. 

Chronicle,  In  its  entirety,  however,  it  was  the  work  of  many 
[60  B.C. —  hands,  both  before  and  after  his  time.  Opening 
1154A.D.\  y/fiiiy  a^  summary  of  early  English  history,  it  grew 
minute  and  copious  about  the  date  of  Alfred's  birth, 
and  in  this  more  regular  manner  was  carried  on  by  contem- 
porary records  for  two  hundred  and  fifty  years  after  his  death, 
closing  with  the  year  1154.  One  of  the  earlier  entries,  under 
date  of  755,  properly  785,  is  the  famous  account  of  the  fatal 
fight  of  Cynewulf,  the  West  Saxon  king  (not  the  Northumbrian 
poet),  with  the  aetheling  (nobleman)  Cyneheard.  It  is  both 
more  rude  in  style  and  more  vivid  than  the  later  records,  and  is 
considered  the  oldest  connected  piece  of  English  prose  extant, 
A  portion  of  it  may  be  quoted,  both  for  its  spirit  and  for  the  light 
it  throws  upon  the  period : 

756.  H6r  Cynewulf  benam  Sigebryht  his  rices  ond  Westseaxna 
wiotan  for  imryhtum  daedum,  buton  Hamtun.scire,  etc. 

"In  this  year  Cynewulf  and  his  West  Saxon  Wise-men  took  from 
Sigebryht  his  kingdom,  except  Hamptonshire,  for  unrighteous  deeds; 
that  he  held,  until  he  slew  the  alderman  [Cumbra]  who  had  longest 
dwelt  with  him.  Then  Cynewulf  drove  him  out  into  Andred-forest, 
and  he  dwelt  there  until  a  herdsman  stabbed  him  to  death  at  Privet's- 


^LFRIC  29 

flood,  avenging  the  alderman  Cumbra.  And  this  Cynewulf  often,  in 
many  fights,  fought  with  the  Welsh  Britons;  and  about  xxxi  winters 
after  he  had  the  kingdom,  he  wanted  to  drive  out  an  getheling  who  was 
called  Cyneheard  (and  this  Cyneheard  was  that  Sigebryht's  brother). 
And  then  he  [Cyneheard]  heard  that  the  king,  was  with  a  small  band 
in  the  company  of  a  woman  at  Merton ;  and  he  surrounded  him  there, 
and  besieged  the  chamber,  before  the  men  who  were  with  the  king  dis- 
covered him.  And  then  the  king  became  aware,  and  he  went  to  the 
door  and  nobly  defended  himself,  until  he  beheld  the  setheling,  and 
then  rushed  out  upon  him  and  wounded  him  severely.  And  they  all 
kept  fighting  against  the  king  until  they  had  slain  him.  And  then  at 
the  woman's  outcry  the  king's  thegns  [retainers]  perceived  the  dis- 
turbance, and  they  ran  thither,  whoever  was  ready  and  quickest. 
And  the  aetheling  offered  each  of  them  money  and  life,  and  none  of 
them  would  take  it ;  but  they  kept  on  fighting  until  they  all  lay  dead 
except  one  British  hostage,  and  he  was  sorely  wounded." 

By  virtue  of  this  chronicle  England  stands  alone  among  the 
nations  of  western  Europe  in  having  her  history,  practically  from 
its  beginning,  written  in  her  own  tongue.  It  is  but  another  of 
the  things  that  show  the  wisdom  of  him  who  is  by  universal  con- 
sent regarded  as  the  wisest  and  greatest  of  English  kings. 

For  a  century  after  the  death  of  Alfred  the  literary  industry 
which  he  fostered  was  maintained,  though  in  no  very  active 
spirit.  The  one  important  name  is  that  of  iElfric, 
fl  </i/i-  first  an  instructor  at  Winchester  and  later  an  abbot 

near  Oxford,  who,  among  other  somewhat  volumi- 
nous works,  translated  and  wrote  several  sets  of  Homilies,  or 
sermons,  long  famous  in  the  history  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  church. 
The  later  ones  are  composed  in  a  rhythmical  and  alliterative 
prose,  intended  clearly  for  delivery  in  some  sort  of  recitative. 
His  earlier  work  is  better,  having  a  sure  and  swift  tread  that 
marks  an  advance  in  the  mastery  of  a  practical  prose  style. 

The  verse  of  the  period  is  meagre.  The  Anglo-Saxon 
Chronicle  contains  several  poems  by  unknown  authors;  the 
battle  of  Brunanburh  (937),  for  instance,  it  records  in  a  fine 
and  famous  song,  which  has  been  translated  by  Tennyson.  An- 
other fragment  of  verse,  commonly  known  as  the  Battle  oj  Mai' 


30  NINTH  TO  ELEVENTH  CENTURIES 

don,  apparently  composed  by  an  eye-witness  immediately  after 
the  battle  (991),  celebrates  in  lofty  measures  the  heroic  death 

of  Byrhtnoth,  a  West  Saxon  earl,  in  one  of  the  dis- 
Verse.  astrous  conflicts  with  the  Danes.     It  closes  with  the 

heroic  but  hopeless  stand  of  an  old  comrade  over 
the  body  of  his  fallen  chief: 

"Byrhtwold  spoke,  buckler  uplifted; 

He  was  an  old  war-comrade ;  shaking  his  spear, 

He  full  boldly  the  men  exhorted : 
'The  soul  shall  the  braver,  the  heart  the  bolder. 

The  courage  the  greater  be,  the  more  our  strength  lessens. 

Here  lieth  our  lord,  all  hewn  to  pieces, 

The  brave  man  fallen.     Ever  may  mourn 

Who  now  from  this  battle-play  thinketh  to  turn. 

I  am  old  in  years ;  go  hence  I  will  not. 

But  here  on  the  ground  beside  my  lord 

I  think  to  lie,  by  this  man  so  beloved.'"* 

This  is  worthy  poetry.  But  it,  and  the  Brunanburh,  stand  almost 
alone.  The  glory  of  West  Saxon  literature  lay  in  its  prose,  and 
to  Alfred  himself  we  look  back  as  to  the  founder,  if  not  exactly 
of  English  prose  as  we  know  it,  yet  of  a  prose  which  was  English 
and  which  does  not  suffer  greatly  by  comparison  with  the  still 
rude  prose  which,  centuries  afterward,  within  the  period  of 
Modern  English,  struggled  so  slowly  up  to  vigorous  maturity. 

Thus  closed  the  Old  English  period.  It  was  marked,  as 
we  have  seen,  by  two  impulses.  The  first  was  the  poetic  impulse 
of  the  north,  yielding  for  its  pagan  product  especially  the  great 
epic,  Beowulj,  and  for  its  later  Christian  product  such  religious 

*"  The  prince,  especiaUy  when  conspicuous  in  position  and  courage,  was 
surrounded  by  a  body  of  young  men  of  ranl{  who  had  committed  themselves  to 
his  personal  service.  They  were  his  companions,  his  thegns.  As  It  was  their 
highest  aim  to  gain  the  first  place  in  his  retinue,  so  was  it  honorable  for  the 
lord  to  have  a  lai-ge  following  of  gallant  youths.  In  peace  they  added  to  his 
pomp;  in  war,  they  wei'e  a  means  of  defence  and  a  source  of  fame.  It  was  their 
most  sacred  duty  to  guard  his  life  in  battle;  nothing  was  deemed  more  dis- 
graceful than  to  forsake  the  chief  in  time  of  need,  nor  to  leave  the  field  alive 
when  he  had  fallen. "— Beknhakd  ten  Bkink,  on  the  institution  known  as  the 
Comitatvs. 


^LFRIC  31 

poems  as  the  paraphrases  and  hymns  of  Csedmon  and  Cynewulf. 
The  second  was  the  impulse  which  resulted  in  the  building  up  of 
prose  in  the  south  by  King  Alfred  and  his  co-laborers  and  suc- 
cessors. The  latter  was  checked  very  much  as  the  former.  The 
defeat  at  Maldon  was  the  forerunner  of  greater  disasters  which 
ended  in  the  downfall  of  yEthelred  the  Unready  and  his  West 
Saxon  kingdom;  and  in  1016  Cnutthe  Dane  declared  himself 
king  of  the  English  realm.  Literature  did  not  wholly  perish, 
for  Cnut  was  wise  and  temperate,  accounting  himself  both  an 
English  and  a  Christian  king;  and  he  even  once  composed 
certain  famous  verses  telling  how 

"Merrily  sang  the  monks  of  Ely 
As  Cnut  the  king  rowed  by."* 

But  literature  passed  into  a  long  eclipse,  to  emerge  again  in 

neither  the  Northern  nor  the  Southern  dialect,  but  the  Midland, 

and  only  after  political  revolutions  had  worked  sweeping  changes 

in  the  social  conditions  of  the  people  and  in  the  very  character 

of  the  language  itself. 

*  Merie  sungen  muneches  binnen  Ely, 
Tha  Cnut  chynlng  ren  ther  by ; 
Roweth,  cnihtes,  noer  the  land, 
And  here  we  thes  muneches  sang. 


PART  II 

MIDDLE  ENGLISH  PERIOD 

FROM  THE  NORMAN  CONQUEST  TO 
HENRY  THE  EIGHTH 

1066-1509 


CHAPTER  III 


TWELFTH   CENTURY — EARLY   NORMAN-FRENCH   INFLUENCE 


Arthurian  Legends 

GEOFFREY  OF 
MONMOUTH 


Abelard 

The  Troubadours 

The  Cid 

Niebelungenlied 


Norman  kings : 

William  the  Conqueror  to 

Stephen 1066-1154 

The  first  Plantagenets  : 

Henry  II 1154-1189 

Richard  1 1189-1199 

The  Crusades 1095-1189 

It  is  unnecessary  to  pursue  history  through  the  reigns  of  the 
obscure  Danish  and  English  kings  who  succeeded  Cnut.  The 
next  decisive  event  to  which  we  come,  an  event  from  which  we 
may  date  a  new  era  in  EngUsh  society,  language,  and  literature,  is 
the  Norman  Conquest,  begun  in  the  year  1066  by  the  memorable 
battle  of  Hastings.  When,  at  that  battle,  the  English  Harold 
fortified  himself  against  the  Norman  invader  on  one  of  the  low 
Sussex  downs,  he  planted  a  banner  embroidered  with  the  design 
of  a  fighting  man.  The  standard  of  the  invading  Duke  William 
was  a  cross,  blessed  by  the  Pope,  and  the  Duke's  men  advanced 
singing  the  French  Song  of  Roland.  The  banner  of  the  fighting 
man  was  swept  away,  and  then  and  there,  says  Bernhard  ten 
Brink,  was  the  sunset  in  England  of  the  ancient  Teutonic  hero- 
age,  the  dawning  of  the  Romantic  Middle  Age. 

For  the  coming  of  the  Norman  meant  a  new  "graft,"  to  use 
M.  Jusserand's  expression,  upon  the  old  English  stock.  It 
meant  the  infusion  of  a  new  spirit  into  the  life  of  the  race,  and, 
possibly,  precisely  the  spirit  that  was  needed  to  redeem  it  from 
the  somewhat  stern,  inflexible  character  it  no  doubt  possessed. 
The  Normans  were  already  a  mixed  race.  Certain  raiding 
Scandinavians,  "Northmen"  like  the  English,  had  made  their 
way  into  a  corner  of  France — Normandy,  it  came  to  be  called — 

35 


30  TWELFTH   CENTURY 

and  established  themselves  there.  They  became  amalgamated 
with  the  native  Franks  and  Celts,  until  in  time  they  were  French 
tributaries,  French  in  language,  religion,  and  culture.  And 
this  amalgamation  was  transferred  to  England,  to  be  further 
fused  with  the  English  race.  Doubtless  it  was  largely  the  funda- 
mental affinity  of  the  Normans  with  the  English  people  that 
enabled  William  the  Conqueror  to  unify  England  and  establish, 
as  he  did,  a  kingdom  which  has  remained  to  the  present  day  un- 
touched by  further  foreign  conquest.  Though  he  freely  created 
barons  of  his  Norman  followers,  he  respected  the  English  laws 
and  customs,  and  half  the  people  were  disposed  to  accept  him 
almost  as  a  sovereign  of  their  own  race.  He  easily  gathen^d 
about  him  an  English  army;  he  even  tried  to  learn  the  English 
language;  his  son  and  successor,  Henry,  married  an  English 
woman ;  and  it  was  not  a  great  many  years  before  the  very  name 
of  Norman  was  practically  forgotten. 

At  first,  however,  the  French  influence  was  strongly  felt,  and 
generally  for  good.  A  more  distinctly  feudal  character  was  given 
to  the  government,  in  which  power  was  nicely  balanced  between 
king  and  barons,  with  supreme  authority  still  in  the  hands  of  the 
king.  The  spirit  of  chivalry  crystallized  in  the  great  religious 
crusades,  with  their  far-reaching  results  in  the  broadening  of 
knowledge  by  contact  with  the  southern  civilizations  of  Europe 
and  the  enrichment  of  imagination  with  the  color,  splendor,  and 
sacred  mysteries  of  the  East.  English  youths  flocked  to  the 
University  of  Paris.  French  itself  became  the  language  of 
court  and  castle. 

Under  these  conditions,  the  prevailing  literature  was  natu- 
rally either  in  the  Latin  language,  as  were  histories  and  ecclesi- 
a.stical  writings,  or  in  Norman  or  Parisian  French,  as  the  Sonfj  of 
Roland  and  the  Song  of  Charlemagne,  which  were  brought 
over  from  France  and  remodelled  by  the  court  singers  in 
England.  With  these  in  general  we  have  nothing  to  do.  But 
an  exception  must  be  made  of  one  particular  body  of  legend 
the  influence  of  which  has  descended  through  the  whole  course 


GEOFFREY  OF   MONMOUTH  37 

of  English  literature  and  seems  to  increase  rather  than  diminish 

with  time.     This  is  the  story  of  King  Arthur. 

The  legend  concerns  not  the  English  themselves,  but  the 

indigenous  Britons;  and  the  two  men  who  at  this  early  period 

had  most  to  do  with  giving  it  currency  came  from 

Arthurian     the  Welsh  border,  and  were  possibly  of  the  old  Briton 

Legends.       stock.  Tradition  said  that  the  race  had  been  founded 

HT  1    by  a  fugitive  Roman  consul,  Brut,  great-grandson 

Monmouth,      J  o  '  >  &  & 

c  1100-        ^^  *^^  ^neas  who  was  fabled  to  have  come  to  Rome 
1154.  from  Troy,  and  the  succession  was  traced  through 

a  long  line  of  British  kings.  This  tradition  Geoffrey 
of  Monmouth,  a  Welsh  priest,  made  into  a  Latin  Historia 
Britonum,  or  History  of  the  Britons,  about  the  year  1135.  The 
history  was  at  once  denounced  by  sober  historians  as  "a  shame- 
less lie,"  and  Geoffrey  himself  could  not  have  believed  very  much 
of  it.  But  it  made  interesting  reading,  and  was  soon  worked 
over  into  Welsh,  English,  and  French.  A  free  metrical  version 
in  French,  the  Roman  de  Brut,  by  the  Jersey  Norman,  Wace,  was 
especially  popular,  and  the  legend  spread  even  to  Germany  and 
Italy.  King  Arthur  in  particular  rose  to  the  rank  of  a  national 
hero  and  speedily  became  the  centre  of  a  large  cycle  of  knightly 
tales.  The  ancient  prophecies  of  Merlin;  the  stories  of  Tristran 
and  of  Launcelot  of  the  Lake;  and  finally,  even  the  Christian 
legend  of  the  Quest  of  the  Holy  Grail,  the  cup  with  which 
Christ  celebrated  the  Last  Supper  were  woven  in.  This  last 
addition  is  commonly  attributed  to  Walter  Map  (c.  1137-1200), 
a  poet  of  Welsh  family  at  the  court  of  Henry  IL,  who,  if  the  con- 
jecture be  correct,  created  the  beautiful  character  of  Sir  Galahad. 
Thus  was  established  a  kind  of  national  hero-saga,  upon  which 
in  succeeding  centuries  some  of  the  greatest  English  romancers 
and  poets  have  delighted  to  exercise  their  finer  fancy.  We  shall 
meet  with  it  very  soon  again,  nor  shall  we  ever  be  long  allowed 
to  forget  it,  except  perhaps  through  that  "classical"  eighteenth 
century  when  the  romantic  spirit  seemed  all  but  extinct. 


CHAPTER  IV 


THIRTEENTH  CENTURY — REVIVAL  OF  ENGLISH 


King  John 1199-1218 

Magna  Charta 1215 

Henry  III 12W-1272 

Edward  J 1272-1307 


I.ATAMON 
OHM 

Cursor  Mundi 

Romances 

Lyrics 


Gottfried  of  Stras- 

burg 
Prose  Edda 
Aucassin  et  Nicolette 


With  the  close  of  the  twelfth  century  passed  the  darkest 
period  of  the  eclipse  of  native  English  literature,  though  a  cen- 
tury and  a  half  were  yet  to  elapse  before  it  emerged  into  anything 
like  brilliance.  The  spoken  language  itself  had  at  no  time  been 
imperilled.  It  pursued  its  own  course  among  the  people,  scarcely 
touched  by  the  new  mode  of  court  and  castle.  Some  sort 
of  vernacular  literature  was  still  kept  alive.  The  Anglo-Saxon 
Chronicle,  we  have  seen,  came  down  to  1154;  certain  rhymed 
sayings,  known  as  Proverbs  of  King  Alfred,  were  current;  and 
popular  songs,  of  course,  never  ceased  to  thrive.  Then,  contem- 
poraneously, as  it  happened,  with  the  political  separation  from 
Normandy  in  1204,  and  only  ten  years  before  John  was  forced 
to  sign  the  Great  Charter  of  English  liberties,  was  composed  a 
long  and  purely  English  poem  of  considerable  interest  and  some 
artistic  merit.     This  was  the  Brut  of  I..ayamon. 

Layamon  was  a  country  priest.     "  There  was  a  priest  in  the 

land  who  was  named  Layamon;  he  was  son  of  I>eovenath;  may 

the  Lord  be  gracious  to  him!"     Thus  he  sings  of 

Layamon's    himself  in  the  opening  of  the  Brut,  and  the  few  facts 
"Brut  "  .  . 

120^  that  he  gives  there  are  all  that  we  know  of  him.     The 

poem  is  an  adaptation  and  extension  of  the  Anglo- 
Norman  Brut  of  Wace,  before  mentioned.  It  contains  over 
32,000  lines,  or  half-lines,  much  of  the  matter  being  of  Layamon's 

38 


ORM  39 

own  addition,  perhaps  from  Welsh  legend.  The  account  of  the 
origin  of  the  Round  Table,  for  instance,  and  the  story  of  the  elves 
who  took  King  Arthur  to  Avalon,  appear  here  for  the  first  time. 
In  some  respects,  therefore,  the  poem  is  really  imaginative  poetry, 
and  not  merely  a  rhythmical  chronicle.  In  form,  it  shows  that 
the  Old  English  alliterative  scheme  was  gradually  breaking 
down.  Alliteration  is  observed,  but  somewhat  irregularly; 
on  the  other  hand  there  is  a  gain  in  accentual  regularity,  ap- 
proaching to  metre,  and  simple  rhymes  now  and  then  occur.  The 
language  is  English,  with  scarcely  one  French  word  in  five  hun- 
dred lines,  but  English,  of  course,  of  the  transitional  period,  that 
is.  Middle  English,  in  which  the  old  inflexional  endings,  gram- 
matical gender,  prefixes,  and  compounds  are  rapidly  disap- 
pearing.* 

^fne  f'an  worden  "Even  with  the  words 

I>er  com  of  se  wenden  There  approached  from  the  sea 

l>at  was  an  sceort  bat  liSen  A  short  boat  coming 

Sceoven  mid  u9en,  Floating  on  the  waves, 

And  twa  wimmen  9er  inne  And  two  women  therein 

Wunderliche  idihte,  Wondrously  fashioned ; 

And  heo  nomen  Ar5ur  anan  And  anon  they  took  Arthur 

And  aneouste  hine  uereden,  And  quickly  bore  him, 

And  softe  hine  adun  leiden,  And  softly  laid  him  down. 

And  for5  gunnen  hinen  liSe.  And  forth  they  departed." 

A  religious  poem  of  the  same  period,  by  the  monk  Orm,  or 

Orrain,  has  a  peculiar  linguistic  value,  because  the  writer  adopted 

the  practice  of  doubling  consonants  whenever  tliev 

1  M  -*o^-  followed  a  short  vowel,  giving  us  thus  a  clew  to  the 
lum,"  c.l21i).  .     .  '  &        & 

pronunciation  of  his  time. 

Nss  boc  iss  nemmnedd  Orrmulum  forrpi  patt  Orrm  itt  wrohhte. 
"This  book  is  called  the  Ormulum  because  'twas  Orm  com- 
posed it." 

Here  we  find  the  old  alliterative  system  largely  given  up,  and  the 

modern  metrical  system  of  evenly  distributed  stresses,  though 

♦There  are  two  versions  of  Layamon's  Brut,  the  earUer  in  the  Southern 
dialect,  the  later,  about  1250,  in  the  Midland.    The  extract  is  from  the  earlier. 


40  THIRTEENTH   CENTURY 

without  rhyme,  practically  established.  The  line  has  seven 
feet,  which  may  readily  be  divided  into  two  lines  of  four  and 
three  feet  respectively.  As  a  paraphrase  of  the  Scriptures  in 
homely  English,  the  poem  might  have  served  a  worthy  purpose, 
could  it  have  become  widely  known;  but  it  is  quite  devoid  of 
Hterary  merit, — "the  most  edifying,"  says  Mr.  Garnett,  "the 
dullest,  and  in  its  original  shape  almost  the  biggest  poem  pro- 
duced before  the  invention  of  printing." 

Yet  other  religious  poems  there  were,  in  great  variety — 
canticles  and  paraphrases,  metrical  homilies  and  lives  of  the 

saints.     One  in  particular,  the  Cursor  Mundi,  "the 
"Cursor 
,,      ,. ,,       best  book  of  all,  'The  Course  of  the  World'  men  do 

it  call,'  is  imposing  by  its  great  length  and  inclusive- 
ness.  It  is  written  in  the  Northern  dialect;  the  author  is  un- 
known. It  attempts  to  recount  the  whole  Bible  narrative,  and 
to  give  to  it  some  of  the  color  of  romance  by  incorporating  every- 
thing in  the  way  of  sacred  or  secular  legend  that  will  make  for 
that  end. 

Far    more  interesting,    are  the    tales    and    versified     ro- 
mances which  the  Cursor  Mundi  was  meant  to  supplant,  and 

with  which  the  literature  of  the  thirteenth  century 
Romances,     abounded.  In  the  main  these  reveal  French  influence 

in  subject,  spirit,  and  form ;  that  is  to  say,  they  rehearse 
the  deeds  of  Charlemagne  and  his  peers,  or  go  back  to  Latin  and 
Greek  traditions  of  Alexander,  etc.;  they  tend  to  be  witty  and 
lighthearted  in  tone;  and  they  supplant  alliteration  with  syllabic 
metre  and  rhyme.  The  octosyllabic  couplet  is  a  favorite  meas- 
ure. Not  a  few,  however,  deal  with  British  subjects,  and  some 
of  them  must  be  of  native  origin.  Such,  in  especial,  are  the 
romances,  or  sagas,  of  King  Horn  and  Havelok  the  Dane.  The 
latter,  which  appears  to  be  an  independent  English  development 
of  an  original  which  grew  up  in  Anglo-Danish  times,  is  an 
absorbingly  interesting  legend  of  the  founding  of  the  English 
town  of  Grimsby,  and  in  its  fresh  and  wild  vigor  takes  us  quite 
back  to  those  times. 


LYRIC    POETRY  41 

"In  Humber  Grim  bigan  to  lende, 
In  Lindeftye,  rict  at  the  north  ende, 
Ther  sat  his  ship  up  on  the  sond, 
But  Grim  it  drou  up  to  the  lond. 
And  there  he  made  a  litel  cote, 
To  him  and  to  hise  flote  .  .  . 
So  that  hit  Grimesbi  calleth  alle 
That  ther-offe  speken  alle, 
And  so  shulen  men  callen  it  ay, 
Bituene  this  and  domesday." 

Minor  lyric  poetry  is  likely  to  be  of  obscure  origin  and  un- 
certain date,  the  more  so  if  it  be  in  the  nature  of  folk  songs,  which 

literary  historians  are  often  disposed  to  treat  with 
j;  scant  courtesy.     The   Middle  English  period  had 

such  in  abundance,  though  it  is  difficult  to  trace  any 
survivals  so  far  back  as  the  precise  time  now  under  considersition. 
For  instance,  the  "proud,"  "courteous,"  and  withal  "pious" 
Robin  Hood  lived,  if  he  lived  at  all,*  in  the  reign  of  Henry  II.,  near 
the  end  of  the  twelfth  century,  and  though  the  Robin  Hood  bal- 
lads as  we  now  have  them  belong  to  a  later  stage  of  poetry  and 
may  not  be  treated  here,  they  quite  possibly  derive  from  thir- 
teenth century  originals.  That  this  outlaw  with  his  misdeeds 
should  have  been  idealized  into  a  popular  hero  is  only  natural, 
since  the  condition  of  the  times  gave  not  a  little  excuse  to  those 
patriotic  Englishmen  who  took  refuge  from  a  hard  forest-law  in 
secret  or  open  outlawry.  The  Owl  and,  the  Nightingale,  a  poem 
of  almost  eighteen  hundred  lines  in  the  Southern  dialect,  dates 
almost  certainly  from  the  reign  of  Henry  III.  It  is  written  in 
romance  couplets,  yet  without  any  traceable  French  origin.  Its 
character,  is  as  lyric  as  its  form  is  didactic,  and  though  it 
is  a  kind  of  moral  debate  between  sobriety  and  gaiety,  it  be- 
trays a  loving  observation  of  nature  that  has  nothing  to  do  with 
didactic  purpose.     A  like  spirit  is  betrayed  in  certain  simple 

♦"Robin  Hood  Is  absolutely  a  creation  of  the  ballad-muse."— Com6ridfl'e 
Ballad*,  ed.  by  G.  L.  Kittredge,  p.  255. 


42  THIRTEENTH   CENTURY 

little  songs  that  have  floated,  unfathered,  from  about  the  same 
period  down  to  the  present  day.     Here  is  a  stanza  of  one: — 

"Sumer  is  icumen  in,  ' 

Lhude  sing  cuccu! 
Groweth  sed,  and  bioweth  med, 

And  springeth  the  wde  nu. 
Sing  cuccu!" 

Such  an  outburst  annihilates  the  centuries  with  its  revelation  of 
the  perennial  human  delight  in  nature's  miracles. 


CHAPTER  V 


FOURTEENTH  CENTURY — AGE  OF  CHAUCER 


Edward  II 1307-J327 

Battle  of  Bannockburn 1314 

Edward  III 1327-1377 

Hundred  Years''  War  beghis  1338 

Battle  of  Crlcy 134S 

Black  Death 1349 

Richard  II 1377-1399 

Gregory    XI.  dencmnce*   Wy- 

clifg  Heresy 1378 

Wat  Tyler's  Insurrection 1381 


The  Green  Knight, 

Dante 

etc. 

Petrarch 

MANDEVILLE 

Boccaccio 

WYCLIF 

Froissart 

LANG LAND 

Hafiz 

GOWEB 

CHAUCER 

The  middle  of  the  fourteenth  century  witnessed  the  con- 
clusion, under  Edward  III.,  of  the  movement  toward  national 
freedom  and  unity  which  was  begun  at  the  time  of  the  Great 
Charter,  under  John.  The  English  spirit  of  independence  was 
everj'Avhere  manifest.  The  voice  of  Parliament  made  itself 
heard  above  the  "divine  right"  of  kings.  Foreign  influence 
survived  chiefly  as  an  inheritance;  with  France  itself  there  was 
long-continued  war.  Xorman  was  become  Englishman,  and 
the  English  tongue  was  far  on  the  way  toward  recovering  com- 
plete ascendency.  English  supplanted  French  in  the  law  courts 
in  1362,  "because  the  French  tongue  is  much  unknown." 
English  was  likewise  heard  in  the  pulpit  and  taught  in  the 
schools.  It  is  eminently  fitting  that  the  time  should  have  been 
made  illustrious  in  literature  by  such  names  as  Mande%'ille, 
Wyclif,    Langland,    Gower,    and   above   all    Chaucer. 

But  before  we  come  to  these  names,  we  must  glance 
at  a  little  group  of  markedly  English  poems  of  the  same 
century  that  possibly  anticipates  them.  Sir  Gawayne  and 
the  Green  Knight,  the  first  of  the  group,  is  one  leaf  of 
the   flourishing  tree   of   Arthurian    romance.     It    relates    how 

43 


44  FOURTEENTH  CENTURY 

a  green-clad  knight  boastfully  appears  at  Arthur's  court, 
and,  when  his  head  is  smitten  off  by  Gawayne,  picks  up  the 
head  by  the  hair,  charges  Gawayne  to  meet  him 
"The  Green  again  within  a  twelve-month  and  a  day,  and  rides 
Knight r  (,flp  The  sequel  of  the  story  is  full  of  interest,  the 
p  ,  „  moral  is  high,  and  the  imagery  and  nature-painting 
c,  1350.  ^^^  unworthy  to  be  compared  with  Beowulf,  though 
more  consciously  elaborated.  The  partly-rhymed 
stanzas  in  which  the  poem  is  written,  revive  too  the  Old  English 
alliterative  scheme.  The  dialect  is  West  Midland.  The 
other  poems  which  have  come  to  us  in  the  same  manuscript 
and  the  same  dialect  are  The  Pearl,  Cleanness,  and  Patience. 
The  two  latter  are  alliterative  religious  poems.  The  Pearl  is 
in  stanzas,  also  with  alliteration.  It  is  a  description  of  a  father's 
vision  of  his  lost  daughter,  his  "pearl"  (French,  marguerite),  to 
whom  he  was  transported  in  a  dream  as  he  lay  asleep  on  her  grave. 
The  mystic  beauty  of  its  descriptions,  and  its  almost  piercing 
pathos,  have  made  it  universally  admired.  We  do  not  know 
who  wrote  these  poems.  If,  as  is  commonly  conjectured,  one 
man  was  the  author  of  all  four,  he  deserves  to  be  set  by  the  side 
of  Laiigland,  excelled  among  fourteenth  c-entury  poets  only  by 
Chaucer  himself. 

We  are  scarcely  on  more  certain  ground,  so  far  as  authorship 
goes,  and  certainly  on  less  securely  English  ground,  in  dealing 
with   the   prose    Travels   of  Sir  John   Mandeville. 
Whether  there  ever  was  a  Sir  John  Mandeville,  and 
I   ' '  aftc      ^^  ^^'  ^^^^t^*^^  ^6  travelled  abroad  or  wrote  the  origi- 
1356.  ^^^  account  of  his  travels,  which  is  in  French,  are  un- 

settled and  really  not  important  questions.  For  a 
long  time  people  believed  that  this  English  knight  set  out  from  St. 
Albans  in  the  year  1322  and  travelled  for  many  years  "thorghe 
manye  dyverse  londes,  and  many  provynces,  and  kingdomes,  and 
iles,"  and  that  he  wrote  out  the  story  in  Latin,  French,  and  Eng- 
lish. It  is  clear  now  that  the  English  version  is  a  translation 
from  the  French  by  another  hand  than  the  writer  of  the  French, 


'  Mnnde- 


WYCLIF  45 

and  that  while  it  assuredly  belongs  to  the  fourteenth  century, 
our  oldest  manuscript  extant  is  somewhat  later  than  1400; 
it  is  also  clear  that  the  book  is  largely  a  compilation  from 
previous  works,  and  that  the  author's  careful  distinctions 
of  "These  things  I  have  seen  with  my  own  eyes,"  and  "Men  say, 
but  I  have  not  seen  it,"  are  merely  clever  artifices.  But  the 
English  work  is  none  the  less  a  genuine  little  masterpiece,  of  enor- 
mous popularity  in  its  day.  Moreover,  it  is  the  oldest  book  of 
English  prose  that  is  not  primarily  historical  or  theological,  but 
literary,  that  is  to  say,  written  and  read  for  entertainment  as  well 
as  instruction.  For  while  the  book  is  professedly  a  pilgrim's 
guide  to  the  Holy  Land,  there  is  nothing  the  author  so  much 
enjoys  as  to  escape  from  fact  into  the  realm  of  fancy.  Sir  John 
is  forever  seeking  "marvels" — the  bird  called  Phoenix  that  rises 
from  its  own  ashes,  the  "hippotaynes"  that  are  half  man  and 
half  horse,  the  people  whose  ears  hang  down  to  their  knees,  the 
apples  of  Paradise  that  have  always  in  the  middle  the  figure  of 
the  holy  cross,  the  lake  made  of  the  tears  of  Adam  and  Eve  who 
wept  on  a  mount  for  a  hundred  years.  The  latter  portion  of  the 
book  is  made  up  chiefly  of  wild  stories  of  the  realm  of  Prester 
John,  fabulous  emperor  of  India,  and  of  the  great  Chan  of 
Cathay.  Everything  is  told,  too,  in  such  good  faith,  and  with 
such  zest,  such  unwearying  assurance  of  "And  you  shall  under- 
stand," and  'There  also  you  shall  see,"  that  the  reader  is  con- 
stantly lured  on,  through  fact  and  fiction,  down  to  the  year  of 
grace  1356,  when  the  old  traveller's  rheumatic  gouts,  "against 
my  will,  God  knoweth,"  fixed  the  end  of  his  labors.  The  book 
needs  only  some  modernization  of  spelling  to  be  easily  read 
to-day. 

The  other  prose  writer  of  first  importance  in  this  age,  dis- 
regarding Chaucer,  was  John  Wyclif.  Wyclif  was  an  Oxford 
scholar  and  a  preacher,  whose  great  service  was  the  impetus 
he  gave  toward  reformation  a  full  century  and  a  half  before  the 
Reformation  itself.  A  considerable  party  in  England,  headed 
by  John  of  Gaunt,  was  just  then  strongly  opposing  the  policy  of 


46 


FOURTEENTH  CENTURY 


the  church  of  Rome,  and  by  numerous  tracts   and    sermons 
Wyclif  both  encouraged  and  supported  Parliament  in  this  oppo- 
sition.    He  is  best  remembered  in  literature,  how- 
0  n     yc-    gygj.    fjjj.  j^jg  translation  of  the  Bible.     This  itself 
lif,  c.  1324  ,     p  ,  •       p  ,     , 

-138A  ^^^  ^"  outgrowth  ot  his  reiormatory  purposes,  for  he 

came  to  see  that  the  surest  way  of  establishing  more 
firmly  the  supreme  authority  of  the  Bible  was  to  put  the  book 
into  the  hands  of  the  people.  The  O.d  English  versions  were 
more  or  less  fragmentary  and  practically  obsolete.  Accordingly, 
with  the  help  of  other  scholars,  he  set  to  work,  taking  for  his 
special  portion  the  New  Testament,  and  about  the  year   1380 

Specimen  from  a  Copy  of  Wyclif  8  Bible  in  the  British  Mxtseum, 

"In  pe  bigynnyng  was  pe  word  &  Ji^e  word  was  at  god-  &  god 
was  fie  word  /  )ris  was  in  pe  bigynnyng  at  god  /  alle  pingis  weren 
maad  hi  hym:  and  wipouten  hym  was  maad  no  ping /pat  ping 
pat  was  maad  in  hym  was  lyf  •  and  pe  lyf  was  pe  li3t  of  men  /  and 
li3t  fchynep  in  derkneffis-  and  derkneflis  comprehendiden  not  it/" 
— John  i.  1-4. 

the  entire  Bible  could  be  read  (of  course  in  manuscript)  in  the 
current  English  tongue.  As  an  example  of  literary  style,  Wyclif 's 
handling  of  the  language  is  creditable,  nothing  more, — his  ver- 
sion is  not  to  be  compared  with  the  great  one  that  came  several 
centuries  later;  but  merely  to  take  English  prose,  which  had  suf- 
fered a  darker  eclipse  than  poetry,  and  establish  it  as  the 
vehicle  of  the  Holy  Scriptures,  was  to  give  it  thenceforth  unques- 
tionable dignity  and  power. 

Wyclif  had  a  powerful  contemporary,  really  a  forerunner, 


LANGLAND  47 

in  the  work  of  assisting  the  popular  reaction  against  the  corrup- 
tion of  the  clergy  and  of  creating  a  deeper  and  purer  religious 
sentiment.     This  was  William  Langland,  or  Langley, 
William        q£  whom  we  know  little  beyond  the  fact  that  he  wrote, 

J:„„     '     in  1362,  with  several  revisions  and  additions  later, 
c.  1332-c.  '       .  .  -71 

lAOO.  ^^^  lo"g  Vision  of  Piers  the  Plowman.     The  poem 

came  at  an  opportune  moment,  just  after  a  destructive 

storm  which,  raging  over  England,  added,  it  seemed,  one  more 

warning  calamity  to  the  Black  Death  of  a  dozen  years  before, 

the  long  evils  of  the  Hundred  Years'  war  with  France,  and  the 

double  taxation  by  Pope  and  King.     Perhaps  it  would  be  truer 

to  say  that  the  poem  was  an  outcome,  not  of  course  of  the  storm, 

which  was  a  minor  incident,  but  of  the  woes  that  had  gathered 

over  the  heads  of  the  poor.     It  was  an  irrepressible  cry  from  the 

depths  of  social  darkness  and  misery.     It  is  cast  in  the  form  of 

a  dream  and  an  allegory,  in  which  this  world  is  viewed  as  "a  fair 

field  full  of  folk"  between  the  Tower  of  Truth  on  the  one  hand 

and  the  Dungeon  of  Darkness  on  the  other,  a  field 

"Of  alle  maner  of  men,  the  mene  and  the  riche, 
Worchinge  and  wondringe,  as  the  world  asketh." 

Falsehood,  Flattery,  the  Seven  Deadly  Sins,  Reason,  Conscience, 
Do- Well  Do-Better,  etc.,  all  play  their  parts,  under  the  guid- 
ance of  Piers  (Peter),  the  simple  plowman,  who  is  Truth,  or  Love, 
or  Christ  himself.  Obscure  in  its  details,  the  general  drift  of 
the  allegory  is  clear  enough,  and  it  was  copied  and  recopied  for 
wade  circulation.  On  its  religious  side  it  shows  a  puritanic  in- 
tensity of  hatred  for  the  wrong  and  devotion  to  the  right;  on  its 
literary  side  it  is  marked  by  passages  of  vivid  portrayal,  now  of 
scenes  from  Scripture  history,  and  now  of  everyday  life  in  field 
or  town.  In  metrical  structure,  it  reveals  little  French  influence, 
employing  a  revived  and  somewhat  regulated  form  of  the  old 
Saxon  alliterative,  unrh^Tned  verse.  It  is  the  last  important 
English  poem  written  in  this  measure. 

John  Gower  was  the  author  of  three  solid  works, — a  moral 


48  FOURTEENTH  CENTURY 

poem  in  French,  a  political  poem  in  Latin,  and  a  narrative- 
didactic  poem  in  English.     This  single  fact,   this  phenomenon 

of  a  tri-lingual  poet,  like  the  tri-lingual  Mandeville'a 
Gower  Travels,  speaks  volumes  for  the  literary  conditions 

13259-1408.  that  still  prevailed.    Though  the  particular  language 

which  a  work  should  be  written  in  might  be  deter- 
mined by  its  purpose,  it  is  clear  that  there  was  much  hesitation 
about  entrusting  any  literary  work  to  the  language  of  the  people 
alone.  But  between  Gower's  first  work  and  his  last,  Chaucer 
had  arisen,  and  Chaucer,  as  we  shall  see,  court  poet  though  he 
was,  fortunately  decided  for  the  language  of  the  people.  And 
it  was  probably  owing  to  Chaucer's  example  that  Gower,  well 
toward  the  end  of  the  fourteenth  century,  wrote  in  English, 
though  under  a  Latin  title,  his  most  important  poem,  the  Con- 
fessio  Amantis  ("Lover's  Confession").  The  nearly  twenty 
thousand  octosyllabic  couplets,  composed 

"in  such  a  maner  wise 
Which  may  be  wisdom  to  the  wise. 
And  pley  to  hem  that  luste  to  pleye," 

contain  numerous  tales  in  illustration  of  the  passion  of  love. 
These  tales,  of  course,  were  meant  to  furnish  the  "play."  But 
Gower  was  too  old  and  garrulous,  and  of  a  wit  too  heavy,  to  com- 
pete with  Chaucer  in  this  vein.  He  might  have  done  better  had 
he  kept  more  strictly  to  the  business  of  attacking,  like  Langland, 
the  Seven  Deadly  Sins.  True,  he  had  nothing  like  Lang- 
land's  moral  earnestness.  The  one  thing  in  which  he  may 
be  conceded  a  measure  of  mastery  is  his  carefully  studied  art; 
for  in  mere  verse  craft,  in  smoothness  of  composition  and 
painstaking  construction,  he  could  and  did  teach  something. 
But  Chancer,  thinking  of  his  early  works,  addressed  him 
in  a  dedication  as  "moral  Gower;"  and  if  we  consider  the 
underl}ing  intention  of  his  English  poem,  the  moral  Gower 
he  may  remain.  Lowell  intimates  that  he  is  to  be  read  only  as 
a  penitential  measure. 

Mainly  to  the  genius  of  Geoffrey  Chaucer  is  due  the  distinc- 


CHAUCER  49 

tion  which  the  fourteenth  century  still  possesses  in  the  annals  of 
English  literature.     That  we  are  ignorant  of  the  exact  year 

of  Chaucer's  birth  is  one  of  those  vexatious  little 
„.  "  ^  uncertainties  that  often  attend  the  biographies  of 
1340 1-  '  great  men,  but  1340  is  now  accepted  as  approximately 
1400.  correct.     We  know  that  he  was  a  son  of  a  London 

vintner,  or  wine-seller,  and  that  his  youth  was  spent 
in  the  neighborhood  of  the  great  bridge  over  which  travellers  to 
and  from  the  south  of  England  were  accustomed  to  pass.  Our 
knowledge  of  the  details  of  his  life  begins  with  his  early  manhood, 
when  he  was  received  as  a  page  into  the  household  of  one  of  the 
royal  princes  and  put  in  the  way  of  preferment  above  the  middle 
station  of  his  birth.  In  1359  he  went  with  the  army  of  Edward 
III.  to  France,  where  he  was  taken  prisoner.  The  king  was 
sufficiently  interested  in  him  to  procure  his  ransom,  and  various 
promotions  followed.  He  was  made  valet  of  the  king's  chamber, 
and  later  comptroller  of  the  customs.  The  most  important  event 
of  the  active  part  of  his  career  was  a  diplomatic  mission  (the 
second  of  several  upon  which  he  was  employed  abroad)  which 
took  him  to  Italy.  He  spent  nearly  the  entire  year  of  1373  at 
Genoa,  Pisa,  and  Florence,  and  obtained  a  knowledge  of  Italian 
manners  and  literature  which  had  a  strong  influence  upon  his  fu- 
ture work.  For  the  rest,  his  life  was  that  of  a  public  officer  and 
dependent  upon  royal  patronage,  prospering  or  not  as  the  winds 
of  favor  blew,  but  faring  well  on  the  whole,  with  plenty  of  leisure, 
and  daily  allowances  of  a  pitcher  of  wine  or  more  substantial  pen- 
sions in  pounds  and  shillings.  Indeed,  he  came  into  lands,  was 
made  a  knight  of  the  shire,  and  sat  once  in  Parliament.  Evi- 
dences of  this  semi-courtierly  life  are  everywhere  in  his  poems. 
The  early  Book  of  the  Duchesse  is  a  graceful  tribute  to  the 
memory  of  Blanche,  first  wife  of  John  of  Gaunt,  his  especial 
patron  and  friend, — the  "lady  dere,"  who  could 

"daunce  so  cornlily, 
Carole  and  singe  so  swetely, 
Laughe  and  pleye  so  womanly," 


50  FOURTEENTH   CENTURY 

who  had  hair  like  gold,  speech  "goodly  softe,"  and  a  heart  "en- 
clyned  toalle  gode."  The  Vdter  Far lement  of  Foules,  in  which  a 
female  eagle  is  wooed  before  an  assembly  of  birds  by  three  eagie 
suitors,  one  of  them  royal,  is  a  joyous  allegory  of  the  betrothal 
of  Anne  of  Bohemia  to  the  young  King  Richard  11.  of  England. 
And  in  almost  the  last  year  of  his  life,  the  poet  addressed  to  the 
new  sovereign,  King  Henry  IV.,  a  Compleint  to  His  Purse,  set- 
ting forth  with  pathetic  humor  how  the  lightness  of  that  impover- 
ished companion  made  him  but  heavy  cheer. 

"To  you,  my  purse,  and  to  non  other  wight 
Compleyne  I,  for  ye  be  my  lady  dere! 
I  am  so  sory,  now  that  ye  be  light; 
For  certes,  but  ye  make  me  hevy  chere, 
Me  were  as  leef  be  leyd  up-on  my  bere; 
For  whiche  un-to  your  mercy  thus  I  crye* 
Beth  hevy  ageyn,  or  elles  mot  I  dye! 

"Now  voucheth  sauf  this  day,  or  hit  be  night, 
That  I  of  you  the  biisful  soun  may  here, 
Or  see  your  colour  lyk  the  sonne  bright, 
That  of  yelownesse  haddc  never  pere. 
Ye  be  my  lyf,  ye  be  myn  liertcs  store, 
Quene  of  comfort  and  of  good  companye: 
Beth  hevy  ageyn,  or  elles  mot  I  dye! 

"  Now  purs,  that  be  to  me  my  ly ves  light. 
And  saveour,  as  doun  in  this  worlde  here. 
Out  of  this  toune  help  me  through  your  might, 
Sin  that  ye  wole  nat  been  my  tresorere; 
For  I  am  shave  as  nye  as  any  frere. 
But  yit  T  pray  un-to  your  curtesye : 
Beth  hevy  ageyn,  or  elles  mot  I  dyel 

Lenvoy. 
"O  conquerour  of  Brutes  Albiounl 
Which  that  by  lyne  and  free  eleccioun 
Ben  verray  king,  this  song  to  you  I  sende; 
And  ye,  that  mowen  al  our  harm  amende, 
Have  minde  up-on  my  supplicacioun ! " 

There  are  several  portraits  of  Chaucer,  one  in  particular 


CHAUCER 


51 


which  we  like  to  think  of  as  genuine,  drawn  by  a  junior  contem- 
porary, Hoccleve,  on  the  margin  of  a  manuscript.     This  drawing 

shows  an  elderly  man,  in  dark  gown  and  hood,  with 
The  Man.     drooping  eyes  and  a  benignant  countenance.     There 

is  a  passage,  moreover,  in  which  Chaucer  professes 
to  describe  himself  in  the  Prologue  to  Sir 
Thopas,  as  a  small  man  with  a  generous 
waist,    a    fair   face,  and  an  "elvish,"  or 
absent,  demeanor.     The  host  says  to  him : 

"Thou  lokest  as  thou  woldest  finde  an  hare, 
For  ever  up-on  the  ground  I  see  thee  stare." 

This  may  or  may  not  be.     What  we  can 
certainly  see  behind  the  writings  is  a  rare 
combination  of  a  scholar  and  an 
observing  man  of  the  world,  one 
modest  and  self-contained,  enjoy- 
ing books,  enjoying  nature,  and 
enjoying  the   motley   spectacle   of 
human  life  in  the  streets  of  London  or 
at  the  court  of  the  king.     He  tells  us  him- 
self, in  the  IIous  of  Fame,  that  he  would 
often  sit  at  a  book  as  dumb  as  any  stone, 
till  his  look  was  fairly  dazed.    But,  in  the 
Prologue  to  the  Legend  of  Good  Women, 
he  farther  says,  that  when  the  month  of 

May  was  come,  with  its  singing  birds  and  springing  flowers, 
then  "Farewell  my  book  and  my  devotion!"  And  we  know 
that  when  he  moved  among  men  and  women,  his  downcast 
eyes  did  not  fail  to  see,  with  a  twinkle  of  humor  or  a  gleam 
of  tenderness  and  pity,  their  countless  shades  of  character  and 
the  diversity  and  perversity  of  their  ways. 

His  work  as  a  writer  comprises  both  prose  and  poetry.  The 
prose  consists  of  two  tales  which  he  finally  incorporated  into  the 
Canterbury  Tales — the  Tale  of  Melihcetis  and  the  Persones  Tale; 
an  unfinished  treatise  on  The  Astrolabe;  and  a  translation  of 


GEOFFREY  CHAUCER. 

{From  the  Hoccleve  MS.) 


52  FOURTEENTH  CENTURY 

Boethius,    which    King    Alfred  had    translated   five  hundred 

years  before.  The  last  is  particularly  interesting  as  showing 
that  even  in  the  lower  field  of  prose  Chaucer  was 

His  Prose,  easily  the  leader  of  all  who  had  thus  far  held  Eng- 
lish worthy  to  be  written.     Portions  of  the  original 

Latin  treatise  are  in  metre,  and  these  Chaucer  rendered  in  a 

semi-poetic  style: 

"O  thou  maker  of  the  whele  that  bereth  the  sterres,  which  that 
art  y-fastned  to  thy  perdurable  chayer,  and  tornest  the  hevene  with 
a  ravisshing  sweigh,  and  constreinest  the  sterres  to  suflren  thy  lawe. 
.  .  .  Tliou  restreinest  the  day  by  shorter  dwelling,  in  the  tyme  of 
colde  winter  that  maketh  the  leves  to  falle.  Thou  dividest  the  swifte 
tydes  of  the  night,  whan  the  hote  somer  is  comen.  Thy  might  atem- 
preth  the  variaunts  sesons  of  the  yere;  so  that  Zephirus  the  deboneir 
wind  bringeth  aye  in  the  leves  that  the  wind  that  highte  Boreas  hath 
reft  awey;  and  the  sedes  that  the  sterre  that  highte  Arcturus  saw,  ben 
waxen  heye  cornes  whan  the  sterre  Sirius  eschaufeth  hem." 

Majestical  and  rhythmical  prose  like  this  was  not  within  the 
compass  of  either  Mandeville  or  Wyclif.  Indeed,  nothing  to 
equal  it  was  to  be  written  for  a  century  to  come,  and  nothing  to 
surpass  it  before  the  time  of  Hooker  and  Bacon. 

Poetry,  however,  was  the  main  occupation  of  Chaucer's  life, 
and  it  is  common  to  divide  his  work,  according  to  the  time  of  its 
production,  into  three  periods.  His  earliest  poems 
His  Poetry,  show  plainly  the  influence  of  the  French  models 
which  still  found  favor  at  court.  He  made 
a  translation  of  the  Roman  de  la  Rose,  a  long  romantic  allegory 
of  the  preceding  century,  then  the  most  widely  known  poem  of 
western  Europe,  and  a  prolific  source  of  inspiration  to  the  late 
mediaeval  rhymers.  There  is  no  certainty  that  this  translation 
has  survived,  but  three  existing  fragments  of  an  English  trans- 
lation of  the  romance  are  usually  included  among  Chaucer's 
poems,  and  it  is  probable  that  the  first  at  least  is  the  work  of  his 
hand.  The  Book  of  the  Duchesse  composed,  in  the  standard  French 
form,  the  short  couplet  as  may  be  seen  from  the  quotation,  page 
49 ,  belongs  also  to  the  early  period  of  his  life.     Besides  these, 


CHAUCER  53 

many  of  his  short  poems — ballades,  roundels,  and  the  Hke,  writ- 
ten at  various  times — were  determined  in  form  by  the  revived 
troubadour  poetry  of  France.* 

After  his  eleven  months'  sojourn  in  Italy,  French  influence 
was  supplemented,  though  not  supplanted,  by  Italian.  Without 
taking  Dante,  Petrarch,  or  Boccaccio  as  models,  he  none  the  less 
got  from  them  further  inspiration.  The  most  important  poems 
of  this  middle  period  are  the  Parlement  of  Foules,  Troilus  and 
Criseyde,  the  IIous  of  Fame,  and  the  Legend  of  Good  Women. 
The  subject  of  the  first  of  these,  a  comparatively  short  poem, 
has  already  been  indicated.  It,  and  Troilus  and  Criseyde, 
are  written  in  a  stanza-form  which  is  always  associated  with 
Chaucer's  name — a  seven-line  stanza,  with  rhymes  arranged 
a  b  a  b  b  c  c,  known  as  "rhyme-royal."  Troilus  and  Criseyde  is 
by  far  the  longest  of  Chaucer's  single  poems,  being  composed  in 
five  books,  each  equal  to  two  of  Milton's  Paradise  Lost.  Despite 
its  classical  subject — it  is  a  tale  of  the  love  of  one  of  the  Trojan 
heroes  for  a  fair  but  faithless  woman — the  story  is  an  inven- 
tion of  the  middle  ages.  Chaucer  obtained  it  directly  from 
Boccaccio,  but  handled  it  with  great  freedom  and  with  abundant 
touches  of  his  own  humor  and  pathos.  Incidentally  we  may 
mention  that  the  story  has  been  a  favorite  one  with  English 
poets,  Shakespeare  and  Dryden  having  written  dramas  on  the 
same  theme.  The  Hous  of  Fame  is  an  unfinished  allegory. 
Through  his  favorite  device  of  a  dream  the  poet  rep- 
resents himself  as  being  carried  by  an  eagle  to  a  palace 
somewhere  between  earth  and  heaven,  whither  every  spoken 

*In  the  two  centuries  preceding,  there  had  flourished  among  the  trouba- 
dours of  Provence,  In  the  south  of  Prance,  a  species  of  highly  artificial  lyric 
poetry.  Love-poems  chiefly,  and  of  the  bead  rather  than  of  the  heart,  they 
were  often  composed  in  marvellously  intricate  verse  forms,  making  continual 
use  of  the  refrain.  In  the  fourteenth  century,  when  the  fashion  had  died  out 
in  the  south,  the  same  sort  of  thing  sprang  up  in  the  north  and  was  carried 
still  further,  largely  supplanting  the  gestea  and  roinans  which  the  northern 
trouveres  had  long  cultivated.  One  of  the  cultivators  of  these  forms,  Eustache 
Deschamps,  who  left  "no  less  than  1175  ballades''  besides  other  lyrics,  was  a 
friend  of  Chaucer  and  dedicated  to  him  one  of  his  ballades.  The  greatest 
French  writer  of  this  school  was  Frangois  Villon,  in  the  succeeding  century. 


54  FOURTEENTH  CENTURY 

word,  even  the  least  whisper,  flies,  making  there  a  sound  that 
ever  "rumbleth  up  and  down,"  and  where  the  words  are,  so  to 
speak,  reincarnated  in  the  persons  of  those  who  spoke  them  on 
earth.  In  the  Legend  of  Good  Wovien,  Hkewise  unfinished, 
Cliauccr  set  himself  to  make  amends  for  the  story  of  the  false 
Cressida,  by  telling  the  stories  of  various  women,  Cleopatra, 
Thisbe,  Dido,  etc.,  "that  been  as  true  as  ever  was  any  steel." 
It  is  this  legend, 

"long  ago 
Sung  by  the  morning  star  of  song,  who  made 

His  music  heard  below, 
Dan  Chaucer,  the  first  warblor," 

U)  which  Tennyson  so  reverently  acknowledges  his  debt  in  his 
own  Dream  of  Fair  Women. 

Chaucer's  third  period  includes  his  greatest  work,  the  fruit 
of  his  maturest  years  and  experience.     All  classical  and  foreign 

„,    „     ,       influences    now    having    been    assimilated    by   his 

The  Canter-  .  "  •' 

bury  Tdles.   thoroughly  English  temperament,  he  began,  about 
1380,  to  weave  together  one  of  the  most  delightful 
collections  of  metrical    stories  in   any  language.     This   is  the 
famous  Canterbury  Tales.     The  plan  of  the  poem  is  simple. 

"Whan  that  Aprille  with  his  shourcs  sotc 
The  droghte  of  Alarche  hath  perccd  to  the  rote, 
And  bathed  every  vcyne  in  swich  licour, 
Of  which  vertu  engendred  is  the  flour; 
Whan  Zephirus  eck  with  his  swete  breeth 
Inspired  hath  in  every  holt  and  hceth 
The  tondre  croppes,  and  the  yongc  sonne 
Hath  in  the  Ram  his  halfe  cours  y-ronne, 
And  smale  fowles  maken  melodye, 
That  slepen  al  the  night  with  open  ye, 
(So  priketh  hem  nature  in  hir  corages) : 
Than  longen  folk  to  goon  on  pilgrimages 
(And  palmers  for  to  seken  straunge  strondes) 
To  feme  halwes,  couthe  in  sondry  londes; 
And  specially,  from  every  shires  ende 
Of  Engelond,  to  Caunterbury  they  wende, 


CHAUCER  55 

The  lioly  >)lisful  martir  for  to  seke,    - 

That  lieni  hath  holpen,  whan  that  thoy  were  seke." 

Pilgrimages  were  a  feature  of  the  times.  Few,  however, 
even  of  the  most  zealous  Christians,  could  undertake  the  long 
journey  to  the  Holy  Sepulchre  at  Jerusalem;  most  had  to  content 
themselves  with  visits  to  more  accessible  shrines.  A  favorite 
journey  for  I>on doners  was  that  to  Canterbury,  the  capital  of  the 
old  Saxon  kings  of  Kent  and,  ever  since  the  arrival  of  Augustine, 
the  metropolis,  or  "mother  city,"  of  the  English  Chvux-h.  Here 
Archbishop  Thomas  a  Becket  had  been  murdered  in  1170  and 


THE  CANTERBTTRY  PILGRiaiS. 

{Section  from  the  Enorarinij  bij  William  Blake.) 

straightAvay  sainted,  and  miraculous  cures  were  held  to  be 
worked  at  his  grave.  For  three  hundred  years  English  men 
and  w-omen  of  every  class  thronged  to  this  shrine,  ostensibly 
from  religious  zeal,  but  often,  no  doubt,  quite  as  much  for  the 
pleasure  of  *a  brief  outing.  The  distance  from  London,  which 
by  present  methods  of  travel  may  be  covered  in  an  hour,  w^as 
sufficient  for  a  tw'o  or  three  days'  easy  "canter,"  to  use  the  phrase 
which  has  come  down  to  us  from  the  picturesque  custom.  Noth- 
ing w'as  more  natural  than  that  a  group  of  pilgrims  should  fall 
to  telling  stories  by  the  way;  and  out  of  such  a  group  and  scene 
Chaucer  formed  the  frame-work  of  his  poem. 


56  FOURTEENTH   CENTURY 

In  Southwark,  just  across  the  bridge  near  which  he  was  born, 
at  the  famous  old  Tabard  Inn,  now  finally  effaced  by  modern 
London,  he  set  his  company  of  nine  and  twenty  sundry  folk, 
including  himself,  on  that  April  day.  With  their  horses  duly 
stabled,  and  supper  served  and  eaten,  the  host  is  represented  as 
proposing  to  them — "so  merry  a  company"  as  he  had  not  seen 
that  year — that  he  join  them  on  the  morrow  and  that  they  each 
tell  two  tales  both  going  and  coming,  the  teller  of  the  best  to  be 
given  on  their  return  a  supper  at  the  common  expense.  In  this 
way  the  poem  is  opened,  with  abundant  provision  for  long  and 
varied  entertainment.  It  was  not  carried  to  completion,  for  we 
get  but  twenty-four  tales.  But  the  unity  of  the  plan  is  practi- 
cally unbroken;  the  various  interludes,  which  go  by  the  name  of 
"  Prologues"  to  the  tales  succeeding,  keep  us  in  mind  of  the  situa- 
tion by  marking  the  stages  of  the  journey,  and  afford  much 
interesting  by-play  between  the  host  and  his  motley  company. 

So  much  of  English  life  and  character,  so  much  of  universal 
human  interest,  and  so  much  of  pure  poetry,  are  comprehended  in 
this  poem  of  fifty  poems  that  to  come  to  an  adequate 
j^  .  appreciation  of  it  is  no  easy  matter.  It  is  true,  we  do 

not  require  to  be  deeply  versed  in  the  history  of  the 
time.  The  poem  is  singularly  free  from  allusions  to  the  stirring 
events  with  which  Chaucer  was  perhaps  only  too  familiar — the 
Hundred  Years'  War,  the  Black  Death,  Wat  Tyler's  Rebellion. 
His  pilgrims  were  glad  enough,  it  may  be,  to  forget  these  things  in 
the  absorbing  interest  of  their  grave  or  merry  tales  drawn  out  of 
the  world's  great  common  store  of  narrative.  But  the  back- 
ground of  fourteenth  century  England  is  nevertheless  here;  and 
it  is  well  to  remember  that  it  was  the  day  when  chivalry  was  in 
its  final  glories  of  extravagant  dress  and  manners,  when  knights 
in  armor  on  gaily  caparisoned  steeds  were  still  ready  to  profess 
deeds  of  valor  for  outraged  virtue's  sake,  if  not  always  so  ready 
to  do  them;  the  day  when  gunpowder  had  not  yet  supplanted 
the  bow  and  arrow;  the  day  of  lingering  faith  in  astrology  and 
the  black  art;  the  day  of  increasing  worldliness  among  monks 


CHAUCER  57 

and  clergy,  and  of  the  rapid  rise  of  middle  class  trade  and  thrift. 
If  we  forget  these  things  or  do  not  know  them,  we  shall  not  get 
into  the  spirit  of  Chaucer. 

Moreover,  it  is  one  of  the  great  virtues  of  this  poem,  which 
ignores  actual  men  and  events  of  its  time,  that  it  portrays  in 
its  numerous  characters,  as  so  many  actual  men  and  women, 
mo^t  of  the  important  types  of  English  society  as  it  was  then 
constituted.  The  company  is  well  mixed.  The  church,  properly 
enough,  furnishes  the  largest  number — a  Monk,  Nuns,  Priests, 
a  Friar,  a  Pardoner,  a  Summoner,  even  a  poor  Parson;  the  pro- 
fession of  arms  is  represented  by  a  Knight  and  a  Squire,  the 
learned  professions  by  a  Clerk  (scholar),  a  Physician,  a  Lawyer, 
and  a  Poet;  there  are  also  a  Franklin  (free-holder),  a  Merchant,  a 
Shipman,  a  Wife,  a  Reeve,  a  Miller,  a  Cook,  and  a  Plowman, 
together  with  a  fraternity  of  mechanics  and  some  minor  per- 
sonages. Only  the  titled  nobility  are  not  here;  the  company  is 
rather  too  democratic  for  that. 

But  while  some  knowledge  of  the  age  is  helpful  in  under- 
standing these  characters  as  types,  none  at  all  is  needed  to  un- 
derstand them  as  individuals.  For  Chaucer  has  the  dramatic 
power  which  makes  them,  each  and  all,  live.  The  Prologue  to 
the  Tales  is  a  long  gallery  of  portraits  that  seem  to  breathe  and 
speak.  We  are  charmed  at  once  by  the  modest  bearing  of  the 
Knight,  lover  of  "trouthe  and  honour,  fredom  and  curteisie," 
who,  just  returned  from  his  adventures  in  heathen  lands,  has  so 
much  to  boast  of  and  boasts  not  at  all.  We  are  amused  at  the 
Monk,  with  his  bald  head  and  shining  face,  no  ghost,  says 
Chaucer,  but  a  lover  of  good  fat  swans  and  hares,  and  as  devoted 
a  huntsman  as  the  countryside  can  show.  Or  mark  the  yellow- 
haired,  trumpet-voiced  Pardoner,  straight  from  Rome  with  his 
spurious  relics, — an  old  pillow-case  masking  as  Our  Lady's 
veil,  and  a  glass  of  pigs'  bones  to  coax  money  from  the  credulous. 
Look  at  the  Shipman,  reckoner  of  tides,  familiar  with  all  havens, 
brown-hued,  with  tempest-shaken  beard,  and  hanging  dagger; 
of  conscience  he  "took  no  keep";  when  he  got  the  upper  hand 


58  FOUllTEENTII  CKNTURY 

of  those  he  fought  with,  he  sent  them  home  "by  water,  to  every 
land."  Contrast  with  the  bold  Wife  of  IJath,  who  had  travelled 
as  far  as  Jerusalem  and  had  led  five  husbands  to  the  altar  in  her 
time,  the  archly  simple  Prioress,  prattling  her  home-learned 
French,  and  ready  to  shed  tears  of  pity  for  a  bleeding  mouse. 
Here  is  human  nature  in  that  infinite  variety  which  custom 
cannot  stale. 

For  the  complete  enjoyment  of  the  tales,  some  study  ol 
their  form  is   required.     Chaucer  was   the   first  English  poet 

to  practice  a  wide  variety  of  line  and  stanza  forms. 
Their  . 

rp  In    particular,  he   was    the    first    to    employ   con- 

tinuously in  English  what  has  become  the  greatest 
instrument  of  our  verse,  the  iambic  pentameter,  or  five-stress 
line;  and  by  using  this  in  rhymed  pairs,  his  favorite  measure 
for  the  Canterbury  Tales,  he  established  our  "heroic  couplet." 
Now,  to  read  this  or  any  of  his  verse  metrically,  we  need  to  be 
familiar  with  his  pronunciation.  For  the  Middle  English  of 
these  poems  is  not  quite  so  modern  as  it  looks;  lines  that  we  read 
readily  enough  at  sight  would  sound  very  strange  to  us  from  the 
poet's  lips.  In  the  matter  of  accent,  for  instance,  there  are  two 
important  points  to  observe:  first,  that  final  e  coming  at  the  end 
of  a  line  (and  elsewhere  before  a  word  beginning  with  any  con- 
sonant except  h),  and  final  ed  and  es  regularly,  are  pronounced 
as  light  syllables;  and  secondly,  that  many  words,  under  French 
influence,  take  the  stress,  or  a  stress,  on  the  last  syllable.  Thus 
we  \ia,\e  A-pril' -le  with,  ilk-e  worthy,  yong-e  women  (but  droghtc 
of,  Marche  hath),  shour'-es,  so'-te  (sweet),  ver-tu',  li-cou/,  na- 
ture', con-di-ci-oun' .  Reading  in  this  way  we  get  the  metre. 
But  we  must  clearly  go  further  and  trj'  to  pronounce  the  words 
approximately  as  Chaucer  would  have  pronounced  them  if  we 
are  to  appreciate  the  full  music  of  the  lines.  In  this  pronun- 
ciation, the  vowels  must  be  given  the  sounds  they  still  com- 
monly have  in  the  continental  languages;  that  is,  long  a  must 
be  sounded  as  ah,  long  e  as  a,  long  i  as  e,  ou  and  ow  as  oo,  etc. 
Radical  changes  will  of  course  be  wrought  in  many  familiar 


CHAUCER  ^    i  r       •  59 

words,  such  as  shoures,   bathed,  flour,  swete,   breeth,  inspired, 

carage;  'small'  and  'tale'  will  be  found  rhyming  (smale,  tale), 

'you'   and   'now'  (you,  nou)  'down'  and  'lion'  (doun,  le-oun'), 

'cheer'  and  'manner'  (chere,  manere).     But  if  we  are  willing  to 

practise  the  pronunciation  till  no  sense  of  quaintness  remains, 

the  really  rich  harmonies  of  Chaucer's  verse  will  fully  emerge.* 

Beyond  the  mere  music  of  the  verse,  however,  which  not 

all  who  read  Chaucer  to-day  will  have  the  patience  to  study  out, 

are  other  poetic  virtues  of  easier  reach  and  more  potent  appeal. 

The  stories  themselves,  which  are  perhaps  in  no  case 

,  ,  ,        '     original,  but  gathered  from  a  variety  of  sources,  bear 
of  Interest.  »        '  o  j  ' 

always  the  hall-mark  of  the  poet's  genius.  They  are 
selected  to  accord  with  the  characters  of  the  narrators,  are  freely 
remodelled  for  narrative  effect,  and  are  embellished  with  a 
hundred  touches  of  native  grace  and  humor.  Humor,  fresh 
and  never  failing,  broad  or  delicate,  is  one  of  Chaucer's  dis- 
tinguishing qualities.  It  comes  out  chiefly  in  his  perception  of 
the  caprices  and  frailties  of  human  nature,  and  there  is  scarcely 
one  of  the  band  of  pilgrims  who  does  not  receive  some  sly 
or  open  thrust  at  his  idiosyncrasies.  For  instance,  after  the 
Man  of  Law  has  told  his  story,  the  Parson  is  called  upon,  but  the 
Shipman  interrupts  with  a  mild  oath  and  offers  to  tell  a  tale  that 
"shall  waken  all  this  company."  The  jovial  host  himself  only 
"spak  of  mirthe  amonges  othere  thinges  Whan  that  we  Iiadde 
maad  our  rekeninges  (paid  our  bills)."  In  the  Nonne  Preestes 
Tale  the  gallant  Chauntecleer  says  to  his  wife,  "  Mulier  est  hom- 
inis  confusio"  ["  Woman  is  man's  torment"],  and  then  the  priest, 
mindful  that  the  women  in  the  party  do  not  know  Ivatin,  grac- 
iously makes  Chauntecleer  translate  the  sentence :  "Womman  is 

*The  pronunciation  of  the  first  lines  of  the  Prologue  may  be  represented 
approximately  thus: 

Whan  that  A-pril-le  with  his*  shuu-res  soh-te 

The  (Jroghts  of  March  hath  pair-sed  to  the  roh-te, 

And  bah-thed  ev«-ry  vain«  in  swich  li-kiiur. 

Of  which  vair-tii  en-gen-dred  is  the  fluur. 
For  a  simple  treatment  of  Chancers  pronunciation  see  Sweet's  Second  Middle 
English  Reader,  or  G.  Hempl's  Chaucer's  Pronunciation. 


60  FOURTEENTH  CENTURY 

mannes  joye  and  al  his  blis."  There  are  tales,  like  that  just 
cited  (the  old  fable  of  Chanticleer  and  the  Fox),  the  whole  pur- 
pose of  which  is  humorous  or  satirical.  On  the  other  hand 
there  are  not  a  few  whose  pathos  and  tenderness  is  moving  to 
the  last  degree.  "  High  seriousness,"  it  is  true,  Matthew  Arnold 
would  deny  to  Chaucer;  and  he  did  not  have  it  in  the  sense  in 
which  Dante  and  Shakespeare  have  it.  It  is  on  this  side  that 
his  limitations  are  most  apparent.  But  court  poet  though  he 
was,  removed  from  close  contact  with  the  poverty  and  oppres- 
sion and  sorrows  and  virtues  of  the  people,  his  eyes  and  heart 
were  not  shut  to  them.  Read  the  Clerk's  Tale  of  the  village 
maiden,  Griselda,  for  a  picture  of  virtue  fostered  among  the 
lowly. 

"But  hye  god  som  tyme  senden  can 
His  grace  in-to  a  litel  oxes  stalle." 

True,  God's  grace  in  the  end  takes  the  inadequate  form  of  a 
nobleman's  graciousness — a  marquis  makes  Griselda  his  wife; 
and  it  is  also  true  that  the  fickle  people  cheer  the  marquis  in  the 
very  height  of  his  cruel  trial  of  her  wifely  patience  and  love. 
But  the  final  lesson  of  the  wickedness  of  a  headstrong  will,  and 
the  beauty  of  virtue  and  humility,  comes  surely  home. 

It  would  be  impossible  to  give  even  a  summary  of  the  re- 
maining merits  of  Chaucer's  poetry,  from  the  verbal  felicity  of 
many  a  single  phrase  to  the  final  revelation  of  what  a  mediaeval 
poet  saw  in  life  this  side  of  the  grave.  One  thing  more,  however, 
that  is  of  particular  interest  to  us  who  live  after  Burns  and  Words- 
worth, will  bear  emphasis.  This  is  the  outdoor  freshness  that 
breathes  through  all  his  verse  and  keeps  it  perennially  sweet. 
The  little  EngUsh  daisy,  white  and  red,  is  in  one  unforgettable 
passage*  immortalized  as  the  flower  of  all  flowers,  ever  fair  and 
fresh  of  hue;  the  moon  shines  down  on  the  forsaken  Ariadne  as 
she  climbs  a  rock  in  the  early  dawn  to  gaze  after  Theseus' s  van- 
ishing bargef;  Cressida,  with  unquiet  heart,  goes  to  sleep  at  last 

*  Legend  of  Good  Women,  Prologue,  40  fl. 
t  Same,  VI.,  309. 


CHAUCER  61 

to  the  song  of  "a  nightingale  upon  a  cedar  green."*    "I  repeat 
to  myself  a  thousand  times,"  says  Lowell, 

'  Whan  that  Aprille  with  his  shoures  sote 
The  droghte  of  Marche  hath  perced  to  the  rote,' 

"and  still  at  the  thousandth  time  a  breath  of  uncontaminate 
spring-tide  seems  to  lift  the  hair  upon  my  forehead."  This  is  not 
the  most  essential  thing  in  Chaucer,  but  it  is  a  very  vital  thing, 
and  whatsoever  of  his  poetry  the  changing  generations  may  like 
or  mislike,  this  wholesomeness  springing  from  the  source  of  all 
human  health  will  surely  not  fail  of  its  appeal. 
♦  TroUus  and  Criseyde,  II.,  918. 


CHAPTER  VI 


FIFTEENTH   CENTURY — PASSING   OF  THE   MIDDLE   AGE 
INTRODUCTION   OF   PRINTING 


Henriea  IV.,  V.,  VI 1399-1461 

Battle  of  Agincourt 1415 

James  I.  of  Scotland 1423-1436 

Wars  of  the  Roses  begun 1455 

Edwards  IV.,  V 1461-1483 

Caxton's  Press  in  England. . .  1476 

Richard  HI 1483-1485 

Henry  VII 148.^-1509 

Discovery  of  America 1492 

Erasmus  in  England 1497 


HOCCLEVE 
LYDGATE 

Ballads 
Miracle  Plays 
and  Moralities 

CAXTON 
MALORY 
DUNBAR 
SKELTON 


Joan  of  Arc 
Villon 
Gutenberg 
Thomas  a  Kempis 
Lorenzo  de'  Medici 
Savonarola 
Leonardo  da  Vinci 
Columbus,  Cabot. 
Vasco  da  Gama 


After  Chaucer,  mediaeval  England  has  little  to  offer  to  the 
student  of  literature  that  does  not  seem  hopelessly  tame.  In  in- 
tellectual and  artistic  sterility  the  fifteenth  century  might  almost 
challenge  comparison  with  the  twelfth.  Yet  the  record  is  not 
without  a  varied  interest.  Chaucer  was  never  wholly  forgotten; 
the  undercurrent  of  popular  verse,  at  no  time  stagnant,  was  then 
particularly  strong;  and  the  introduction  of  printing  at  the  end 
of  the  century  gave  a  powerful  impulse  to  prose  and  was  attended 
by  a  bright,  if  somewhat  transient,  gleam  of  poetry. 

Among  the  immediate  successors  of  Chaucer  were  two  whose 
names  are  always  recorded,  though  to  the  ordinary  reader  of 
to-day  they  remain  only  names.  One  was  Thomas 
Hoccleve,  or  Occleve,  who  has  been  already  men- 
tioned as  having  probably  drawn  the  portrait  of 
Chaucer  to  be  seen  in  Hoccleve's  manuscript  of  De 
Regimine  Principum,  and  who  was  among  the  sin- 
cerest  mourners  of  Chaucer's  death.  "O  master  dear,  my 
master!"  he  exclaims.  He  was  a  facile  WTiter  of  rather  indif- 
erent  poems  and  versified  tales,  mostly  of  a  personal,   gossipy 


Thomas 
Hoccleve, 
d.  about 
1450. 


63 


LTBGATE  63 

nature,  but  with  a  trend  toward  the  didactic,  especially  in  his 
later  days  of  mingled  regret  for  lost  youth  and  repentance  for 

the  follies  of    it.     The  other  was  John   Lydgate,  a 

somewhat  worldly  Benedictine  monk  of  Bury  St. 
about  1450    Edmunds,  who  was  likewise  a  disciple  and  imitator 

of  the  unapproachable  master.  He  composed  a 
long  Troye  Book,  inspired  by  the  interest  in  that  subject  aroused 
by  Chaucer's  Troilus,  and  he  frankly  endeavored  to  continue 
the  Canterbury  Tales  with  a  Storie  of  Thebes.  His  most  pop- 
ular book  was  the  Falles  of  Princes.  He  was  extremely  versatile, 
writing  at  great  length  on  all  sorts  of  subjects,  with  the  result 
that,  in  spite  of  his  once  considerable  fame,  many  of  his  poems 
remain  to  this  day  unpublished. 

After  these  men,  the  influence  of  Chaucer  is  hardly  worth 
tracing  until  it  won  renewed  strength  with  the  introduction  of 

printing.  Meanwhile  we  may  take  note  of  several 
Ballads.        species   of  popular  poetry  that   flourished   in   this 

otherwise  obscure  period.  One  is  the  ballad.  Just 
how  old  our  old  ballads  are,  can  seldom  be  determined.  It  is  of 
course  possible,  as  w^as  noted  in  a  previous  chapter,  that  ballads  of 
Robin  Hood,  for  instance,  appeared  in  the  twelfth  century, 
when  that  mythical  outlaw  was  supposed  to  have  lived.  But 
we  know  that  scarcely  any  ballads  as  we  now  have  them  can 
be  dated  earlier  than  the  fifteenth  century.  Of  course  very 
few  manuscripts  or  prints  go  back  even  that  far.  The  earliest 
draft  of  Chevy  Chace,  which  celebrates  the  battle  of  Otterburn 
(1388),  may  be  very  old.  Robin  Hood  and  the  Monk  is  from 
a  manuscript  "of  about  1450."  A  fragment  of  A  Gest  of 
Rohyn  Hode  was  printed  possibly  by  1489.  The  evidence  merely 
points  to  the  fifteenth  century  as  a  time  of  marked  growth  in 
the  production  of  ballads,  wuth  the  north  of  England  and  the 
Scottish  border  as  their  especial  domain. 

The  virtue  of  these  rude  chants,  whether  local  folk  ballads, 
or  the  more  ambitious  productions  sung  by  professional  minstrels 
at  merr\Tnakings,  or  by  town-pipers  from  door  to  door,  lies  in 


64  FIFTEENTH  CENTURY 

their  directness  and  simplicity.  Figures  of  speech,  or  artifices  ol 
any  kind  beyond  the  unconscious  art  of  climax,  are  uncommon. 
They  go  straight  to  their  story;  and  the  story,  sometimes  humor- 
ous, more  often  tragic,  is  usually  tense  with  primitive  human  pas- 
sion. It  would  be  useless  to  try  to  select,  from  so  great  and  varied 
a  company,  any  one  as  best  or  even  as  representative.  But  for 
perfect  lyric  grace  and  sustained  charm  both  of  manner  and 
matter  the  well  known  Nut-Brown  Maid  (first  printed  at 
Antwerp  in  1502)  may  be  safely  instanced. 

He.     "It  stondith  so,  a  dede  I  do,  wherfore  moche  harme  shal  growe, 

My  desteny  is  for  to  dey  a  shamful  dethe,  I  trowe, 

Or  ellis  to  flee;  the  ton  must  bee,  none  other  wey  I  knowe 

But  to  withdrawe,  as  an  outlaw,  and  take  me  to  my  bowe; 

Wherfore  adew,  my  owne  hert  trewe,  none  other  rede  I  can. 

For  I  must  to  the  grene  wode  goo,  alone,  a  bannysshed  man." 

She.     "O  Lorde,  what  is  this  worldis  blisse,  that  chaungeth  as  the 

mone? 
My  somers  day,  in  lusty  may,  is  derked  before  the  none; 
I  here  you  saye  'farwel';  nay,  nay,  we  departe  not  soo  sone; 
Why  say  ye  so,  wheder  wyl  ye  goo,  alas!  what  have  ye  done? 
Alle  my  welfare  to  sorow  and  care  shulde  chaunge,  yf  ye  were  gon; 
For  in  my  mynde,  of  all  mankynde,  I  love  but  you  alone." 

(Stanzas  5  and  6.) 

Another  kind  of  popular  literature  flourishing  in  this  period 
was  the  mediaeval  drama,  in  its  several  forms  of  Mysteries,  or 

Miracle  Plays,*  and  Moralities.  Historically,  though 
p,  not  mtrinsically,  these  are  of  more  importance  than 

the  ballads,   both  because  they  attach  themselves 

more  closely  to  the  general  literature  of  western  Europe  and  be- 

*The  Latin  and  French  distinction  between  Mysteries,  as  dealing  with 
scenes  directly  from  the  Bible,  and  Miracle  flays,  as  dealing  with  legends  of 
the  lives  of  the  saints,  was  not  preserved  in  England,  where  Miracle  Plays  was 
the  general  term.  But  since  the  English  Miracle  Plays,  as  far  as  we  know 
them,  almost  all  correspond  to  the  first  definition,  late  scholars  have  often  i)re- 
ferrcd  to  call  them  Mysteries.  The  distinction,  on  the  other  hand,  between 
Miracle  Plays  and  Moralities,  in  which  latter  the  characters  are  mainly 
neither  Biblical  nor  legendary,  but  personified  abstractions,  was.  and  is  still, 
sharply  made. 


MIRACLE   PLAYS  G5 

cause  they  play  a  special  part  in  the  rise  of  the  drama  in  England. 
In  the  former  aspect  they  cannot  be  discussed  here.  Suffice  it  to 
state  that  their  beginnings  in  England  must  be  sought  in  the 
time  of  early  Norman-French  influence,  and  that  the  earliest 
plays  were  Latin  or  French.  It  was  not  long,  however,  before 
they  were  composed  and  produced  in  English. 

The  origin  of  these  plays,  in  whatever  country,  may  be  easily 
traced  to  the  service  of  the  Roman  Catholic  Church,  with  its 
wealth  of  sjinbolism  and  elaborate  ceremon}\  The  mere  alter- 
nation of  reading  and  singing  is  a  dramatic  feature  of  that 
service;  while  the  stately  processions  of  Christmas  and  Easter- 
tide, with  costumes  and  incense  and  chanting,  are  highly  dramatic 
in  effect.  Naturally  this  obvious  means  of  presenting  vividly  to 
an  unlettered  people  the  scenes  of  the  Bible  and  enforcing  its 
truths  was  made  more  and  more  of.  An  actual  Christ-child  was 
sometimes  portrayed  in  the  manger;  the  three  Wise  Men  came 
out  of  the  East;  God  himself,  in  a  white  coat  and  with  gilded 
face,  appeared  on  the  stage.  And  as  the  spectacles  grew  in 
popularity,  they  were  transferred  from  the  church  to  the  church- 
yard, and  then  to  the  village  streets  or  green,  where  they  were 
performed  upon  movable  stages.  They  began  to  include  whole 
cycles,  or  series,  of  Bible  stories,  one  set  covering  the  events 
from  the  Creation  of  the  World  and  the  Fall  of  Adam  down 
to  the  Flood,  another  the  Passion  of  Christ  from  the  Last  Sup- 
per and  the  Betrayal  to  the  Crucifixion  and  the  Resurrection. 
In  England,  as  they  passed  out  of  the  hands  of  the  clergy,  they 
were  taken  up  by  the  town  guilds,  a  kind  of  trades-unions, 
who  made  use  of  them  to  celebrate  their  regular  festival  days. 

If  we  imagine  for  a  moment  any  modern  village  community, 
school,  or  local  organization,  preparing  a  little  play  or  cantata 
for  public  performance,  we  shall  understand  the  situation.  The 
success  of  one  play  leads  to  a  repetition  or  to  a  second  play,  and  a 
custom  is  soon  established.  This  is  precisely  what  took  place, 
and  the  manuscripts  of  the  plays,  as  they  grew  from  year  to  year, 
came  to  be  carefully  preserved  in  the  church  or  town  archives. 


66  FIFTEENTH  CENTURT 

Thus  it  happens  that  there  have  survived  in  England,  besides 
scattered  remnants,  four  more  or  less  complete  cycles  of  Miracle 
Plays:  the  York,  the  Wakefield  (or  Towneley),  the  Coventry, 
and  the  Chester  collections.  Nearly  every  town  of  importance 
must  have  had  its  collections.  The  oldest  single  play  we  have 
is  The  Ilarrovying  of  Hell,  probably  from  early  in  the  fourteenth 
century.  The  York  cycle  of  forty-eight  plays  comes  from  the 
end  of  the  same  century.  We  know  from  a  town  clerk's  record 
the  exact  order  in  which  these  were  produced  at  York  at  the 
Corpus  Christi  festival  in  the  year  1416,  when  the  tanners  pre- 
sented the  creation  of  the  heavens  and  the  fall  of  the  angels,  the 
plasterers  the  creation  of  earth,  the  shipwrights  the  building  of 
the  ark,  and  so  on. 

As  the  production  of  them  passed  out  of  church  control,  it 
was  quite  natural  to  extend  the  scope  of  the  plays,  and  the  com- 
position of  Moralities  began.  These  are  allegories 
Moralities,  in  which  the  characters  are  personified  abstractions, 
representing  some  conflict  between  the  various  facul- 
ties and  especially  the  virtues  and  vices  of  men,  thus  conveying 
a  moral  lesson.  For  instance.  The  Castell  of  Perseverance,  an 
early  Morality  of  the  fifteenth  century,  reveals  in  its  name  very 
clearly  its  purpose.  Tn  another,  called  Everyinan,  which  was 
extremely  popular  in  the  reign  of  Henry  VIII.,  is  presented 
the  situation  of  a  man — any  man,  every  man — who  is  suddenly 
summoned  by  Death,  and  who,  after  making  vain  and  j)atheti(; 
appeal  to  such  friends  as  Kindred,  Goods,  and  Beauty,  to  ac- 
company him,  finally  goes  down  into  tlie  grave  attended  only 
by  the  faithful  Good-Deeds. 

The  metrical  form  of  both  Miracle  Plays  and  Moralities  is 
exceedingly  various,  with  alliteration  and  rhyme,  lines  of  all 
lengths,  and  stanzas  of  every  device.  Their  literary  merit  is 
slight,  and  their  chief  interest  for  us  lies,  as  was  said  above,  in 
the  light  they  throw  on  the  development  of  the  later  English 
drama.  Poetry  was  hardly  to  be  served  by  adorningthe  simple 
Bible  narratives.    Take,  as  an  example  of  the  metrical  quality, 


MORALITIES  67 

and  at  the  same  time  the  rough  humor  and  homely  reaUsm  that 
often  mark  these  plays,  this  "Good  Gossippes  Songe"  from 
Noah's  Flood,  of  the  Chester  cycle: 

"The  flude  comes  fleetinge  in  full  faste, 

One  every  syde  that  spreades  full  farre; 
For  feare  of  drowninge  I  am  agaste; 

Good  gossipes,  lett  us  drawe  nere. 
And  lett  us  drinke  or  we  departe, 

For  ofte  tymes  we  have  done  soe; 
For  att  a  droughte  thou  drinkes  a  quarte, 

And  soe  will  I  doe  or  I  goe." 

The  Moralities,  tolerable  and  even  effective  though  they  be  as 
spectacles,  make  dull  reading  to  an  age  that  is  impatient  of  alle- 
gories. Yet  now  and  then  the  dulness  is  redeemed  by  a  touch 
of  poetic  feeling,  as  when  Everyman,  on  the  way  to  death,  makes 
his  piteous  complaint: 

"O,  to  whome  shall  I  make  my  mone 

For  to  go  with  me  in  that  hevy  journaye? 
Fyrst  Felowshyp  sayd  he  wolde  with  me  gonej 

His  wordes  were  very  pleasaunt  and  gaye, 
But  afterwarde  he  lefte  me  alone. 
Then  spake  I  to  my  kynnesmen  all  in  dyspayre, 
And  also  they  gave  me  wordes  fayre ; 
They  lacked  no  fayre  spekjmge, 
But  all  forsake  me  in  the  endynge!" 

Sometimes,  too,  even  the  cold  allegory  grows  warm  in  its  vivid 
seizure  of  the  facts  of  life,  as  when  this  same  doomed  Everyman 
is  deserted,  by  Beauty,  Strength,  Discretion,  even  Five- Wits,  one 
after  the  other,  while  Knowledge,  in  finely  unconscious  satire  of 
the  bold  curiosity  of  philosophy  and  science,  follows  to  the  very 
verge  of  the  grave,  "Till  I  see  where  ye  shall  be  come."  The 
production  of  these  plays  continued  quite  to  the  time  of  Shajce- 
speare,  when  they  and  their  successors  alike  gave  way  before 
the  great  human  Elizabethan  drama. 

England's  outward  history  through  the  fifteenth  century 


GS 


FIFTEENTH  CENTURY 


had  apparently  little  bearing  upon  her  literature,  unless,  indeed 
the  long  Wars  of  the  Roses,  in  the  latter  part  of  that  period 
served  to  repress  writing.  Certainly  it  was  many  decades 
before  these  wars  lent  their  color  to  drama  and  romance.  Guten- 
berg's invention  of  printing,  however, 
the  great  intellectual  event  of  the  cen- 
tury in  Europe,  was  bound  to  be  of  the 
highest  significance  to  so  intellectual 
a  nation.  By  good  fortune  a  very  in- 
telligent English    merchant,  William 

Caxton,    was   for  a   long 
I  mm        ^^^^  ^^  ^l^jg    period   res- 
(J (ixtoti  c 
l422?-'l491    ^'^^"t  '^"^  Flanders,  then  a 

centre  of  wealth,  com- 
merce, and  art.  There,  when  about 
fifty  years  of  age,  becoming  interested 
in  a  certain  French  book  of  Trojan 
legends,  he  translated  it  into  English, 
and  finding  it  in  demand  by  the  Eng- 
lish residents  of  Flanders,  he  had  it  •printed,  assisting  in  the 
process  himself.  Thus  his  Recuyell  (collection)  o/  the  Historyes 
of  Troye,  issued  at  Bruges  about  1474,  had  the  honor  of  being 
the  first  book  printed  in  the  English  language.  Then,  in  147G, 
if  our  dates  may  be  trusted,  Caxton  returned  to  London  and 
set  up  a  printing  press  in  W^estminster,  near  the  Abbey,  and  the 
new  power  was  established  on  English  soil. 

Caxton  was  an  industrious  translator,  with  some  appre- 
ciation for  real  literature,  especially  on  its  romantic  side,  and 
Malory's  ^'^^^  ^  ^"®  ^''^^^^^  ^"  ^^^^  capacities  and  possibilities 
"Morte  of  English  prose.  His  final  great  service  to  English 
Dnr^hur,"  literature,  however,  lay  not  in  any  of  his  own 
J485.  numerous  translations,  but  in  the  publication  and 

consequent  rescue  from  possible  oblivion  of  the  great  English 
prose  romance,  the  Mode  Darthur  ("The  Death  of  Arthur"), 
by    Sir   Thomas   Malory.      In  regard   to   the  personality   of 


PRINTING-  PRKSS. 

i'aed  by  Outenbero  in  I4'>0. 


MALORY  69 

the  author,  there  has  been  much  speculation.  Caxton  simply 
tells  us  that  he  printed  Malory's  book,  which  IMalory  had 
taken  "out  of  certain  books  of  French";  and  Malory  tells 
us  that  he  finished  writing  the  book  in  the  year  1470.  At 
last  it  seems  to  be  clearly  proved*  that  he  was  a  gentleman 
of  that  county  which  a  century  later  gave  us  Shakespeare,  and 
that  he  was  a  follower  of  Richard  Beauchamp,  Earl  of  Warwick, 
dying  in  1470,  before  his  book  was  printed. 

As  for  the  book,  it  was  largely  a  translation,  and  perhaps 
almost  wholly  a  compilation,  yet  it  proved  to  be  by  all  odds  the 
best  comprehensive  recital  of  the  Arthurian  stories  in  any 
tongue,  and  such  it  has  remained,  beyond  possibility  now  of 
being  ever  superseded.  For  Malory  not  only  gathered  the 
confused  mass  of  legends  into  a  connected  and  consistent  whole, 
perhaps  a  little  tedious  in  length,  yet  endlessly  fascinating  in 
variety  of  lively  episodes,  but  he  also  had  the  poetic  feeling  which 
transmutes  his  style  to  one  quality  with  his  golden  matter.  He 
writes  a  narrative  prose  that  is  unmatched,  until  Bunyan,  for 
simplicity,  directness,  and  force;  and  whenever  there  is  occasion 
for  scorn  or  pity  or  pathos,  without  any  departure  from  the  im- 
personal attitude  of  the  true  story-teller  he  sets  down  the  unerring 
word  or  the  full-charged  phrase,  and  his  sentences  march  in 
rhythmic  tune.  The  very  unity  of  the  whole  springs  from  a  deep 
consciousness  of  the  overhanging  tragedy  of  Arthur's  fate, 
whereby,  after  a  life  of  glorious  deeds,  he  sees  his  Round  Table 
and  his  realm  dissolved,  and  his  own  days  close  in  darkness. 
Immeasurably  sad  is  the  story  of  the  wounded  king's  passing, 
told  with  scarcely  any  more  effort  than  the  merest  episode  in  the 
long  chronicle: 

"But  I  may  not  stand,  my  head  works  so.  Ah,  Sir  Launcelot, 
said  king  Arthur,  this  day  have  I  sore  missed  thee.  Alas,  that  ever 
I  was  against  thee,  for  now  have  I  my  death,  whereof  Sir  Gawaine  me 
warned  in  my  dream.  .  .  .  Then  Sir  Bedivere  wept  for  the  death 
of  his  brother.  Leave  this  mourning  and  weeping,  said  the  king,  for 
all  this  will  not  avail  me;  .  .  .  but  take  thou  Excalibur,  my  good 

♦Professor  G.  L.  Kittredge:     Who  was  Sir  Thomas  Malory? 


70  FIFTEENTH  CENTURY 

sword,  and  go  with  it  to  yonder  water  side,  and  when  thou  comest 
there,  I  charge  thee  throw  my  sword  in  that  water,  and  come  again, 
and  tell  me  what  thou  there  seest.  .  .  .  Then  Sir  Bedivere  departed, 
and  went  to  the  sword,  and  lightly  took  it  up,  and  went  to  the  water 
side,  and  there  he  bound  the  girdle  about  the  hilts,  and  then  he  threw 
the  sword  as  far  into  the  water  as  he  might,  and  there  came  an  arm 
and  an  hand  above  the  water,  and  met  it,  and  caught  it,  and  so  shook 
it  thrice  and  brandished,  and  then  vanished  away  the  hand  with  the 
sword  in  the  water.  So  Sir  Bedivere  came  again  to  the  king,  and  told 
him  what  he  saw.  Alas,  said  the  king,  help  me  hence,  for  I  dread  me 
I  have  tarried  over  long.  Then  Sir  Bedivere  took  the  king  upon  his 
back,  and  so  went  with  him  to  that  water  side.  And  when  they  were 
at  the  water  side,  even  fast  by  the  bank  hoved  a  little  barge,  with 
many  fair  ladies  in  it,  and  among  them  all  was  a  queen,  and  all  they 
had  black  hoods,  and  all  they  wept  and  shrieked  when  they  saw  king 
Arthur.  Now  put  me  into  the  barge,  said  the  king:  and  so  he  did 
softly.  .  .  .  And  so  then  they  rowed  from  the  land;  and  Sir  Bedivere 
beheld  all  those  ladies  go  from  him.  Then  Sir  Bedivere  cried,  Ah,  my 
lord  Arthur,  what  shall  become  of  me  now  ye  go  from  me,  and  leave 
me  here  alone  among  mine  enemies.  Comfort  thyself,  said  the  king, 
and  do  as  well  as  thou  mayest,  for  in  me  is  no  trust  for  to  trust  in.  For 
I  will  into  the  vale  of  Avilion,  to  heal  me  of  my  grieA'^ous  wound.  And 
if  thou  hear  never  more  of  me,  pray  for  my  soul.  But  ever  the  queens 
and  the  ladies  wept  and  shrieked,  that  it  was  pity  to  hear." 

— (Strachey's  edition,  with  modernized  spelling.) 

Tennyson  himself,  with  all  the  resources  of  poetry  and  his  own 
incomparable  art,  has  not  made  this  scene  a  whit  more  effective. 
The  book,  compilation  though  it  be,  has  proved  in 
the  fullest  sense  a  literary  source.  It  was  periodically  reprinted 
for  over  a  hundred  years;  then,  with  the  decline  of  interest  in 
romance  through  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries,  it 
was  neglected,  to  become  again  in  the  nineteenth  century  a 
living  book.  Thus  it  has  ministered  to  the  delight  of  widely 
separated  generations  of  readers;  and  to  such  poets  as  Spenser, 
Dryden,  Tennyson,  Arnold,  Morris,  and  Swinburne,  has  afforded 
both  matter  and  inspiration. 

Recurring  now  to  poetry,  we  find  at  the  turning  of  the  cen- 
tury somewhat  better  conditions  than  had  yet  obtained  since  the 


DUNBAR  71 

death  of  Chaucer.  The  fact  that  Chaucer's  works  were  in- 
cluded among  the  ninety-nine  books  which  the  enterprising 
Caxton  printed  may  have  had  something  to  do  with  this,  but 
individual  talent  had  more.  Men  like  the  Scotch  Dunbar  and 
the  English  Skelton  had  sufficient  originality  to  stand  on  their 
own  merits.  At  the  same  time,  comparison  with  Chaucer  in 
point  of  merit  is  still  utterly  out  of  the  question  and  must  be 
deferred  for  nearly  another  century. 

Scotland,  a  separate  kingdom,  had  developed  a  strong 
national  feeling  since  the  days  of  Wallace  and  Bruce,  the  heroes 
who  had  preser\'ed  her  independence,  and  this  national  feeling 
had  come  to  some  obscure  expression  in  long  poems  upon  the 
deeds  of  those  heroes.  But  in  the  period  of  which  we  now  speak, 
the  only  period  until  very  modern  times  when  Scottish  literature 
really  entered  into  competition  with  that  south  of  the  river 
Tweed,  this  feeling  was  not,  except  in  the  folk  ballads,  very 
perceptible  in  Scotland's  poetry.  On  the  other  hand,  literary 
svTnpathy  with  England  was  strong.  The  Scotch  literary 
dialect  was  itself  an  outgrowth  of  Northern  English,  and  was 
not  yet  called  Scotch.  In  spite  of  its  differences,  it  was  felt  to 
belong  to  the  same  language  as  the  London,  or  Midland,  Eng- 
lish which  from  Chaucer's  time  was  the  standard  language  of 
England.  Moreover,  Chaucer  was  held  in  especial  esteem  by 
the  Scottish  writers.  King  James  I.  himself  wTote  a 
poem  (The  Kingis  Quair,  "King's  Book,"  c.  1423)  in  the 
"rhyme  royal"  of  Chaucer,  perhaps  thus  giving  origin  to  the 
name.  Scottish  poetry  therefore,  of  the  fifteenth  century 
scarcely  differs  from  English  in  national  feeling,  but  only,  first, 
in  dialect,  and  second,  in  a  more  marked  reflection  of  French 
influence  through  Chaucerian  tradition  and  through  the  closer 
political  relations  of  Scotland  with  France. 

Of  the  four  Scotch  poets  who  might  claim  attention — James 
I.  at  the  beginning  of  the  century,  Robert  Henryson  in  the 
middle,  William  Dunbar  and  Gawin  Douglas  at  the  end — 
Dunbar  is  best  remembered.    He  was  attached  to  the  court  of 


72  FIFTEENTH  CENTURY 

James  IV.,  and  was  in  London  with  the  embassy  that  in 
1501  arranged  the  marriage  between  Henry  VII. 's  daughter 
Margaret  and  the  Scottish  King.  "London! 
Wt  lam  ^j^^^  ^^  ^j^^  flower  of  cities  all,"  he  exclaims 
DtiTibciT  c, 
1465-1530     ^"  ^  poem  eloquent  with  delight.     Two  years  later, 

when  the  marriage  was  consummated,  his  Thistle 
and  the  Rose  {The  Thrissill  and  the  Rois)  celebrated  the  union 
in  rhyme  royal.  As  its  title  shows,  it  is  allegorical,  in  full  con- 
formity with  the  French  taste.  It  is  also  pretty  directly  imi- 
tative of  Chaucer: — 

"Quhen  Merche  wes  with  variand  windis  past, 
And  Appryl  had,  with  her  silver  schouris, 
Tane  leif  at  Nature  with  anc  orient  blast, 
And  lusty  May,  that  muddir  is  of  flouris, 
Had  maid  the  birdis  to  bcgyn  thair  houris 
Amang  the  tendir  odouris  rcid  and  quhyt, 
Quhois  ai'mony  to  heir  it  wes  dclyt,"  etc. 

At  the  same  time,  it  shows  a  genuine  love  of  nature,  one  of 
the  constant  merits  of  the  Scottish  school.  In  the  debate  of 
The  Merle  and  the  Nightingale,  a  })oem  of  excellent  workman- 
ship and  rare  sweetness,  an  alternate  refrain  impressively 
iterates  the  religious  lesson  that  "All  love  is  lost  but  upon  God 
alone."  In  The  Dance  of  the  Seven  Deadly  Sins  (1507),  satire 
and  buffoonery  join  unsparing  hands.  Thus,  on  various  counts, 
Dunbar  deserves  his  position  as  the  early  laureate  of  Scotland. 
If  we  pass  over  the  uneven  and  prolix  allegorist,  Stephen 
Hawes,  there  is  but  one  name  in  England  to  match  that  of 

Dunbar's  in  the  North  during  this  short-lived  poetic 

"  ^      ^  '    revival.    John  Skelton  was  a  tutor  of  Prince  Henry, 

13^9  afterward    Henry    VIII.,   and    a    churchman     till 

the  time  when  he  fell  out  of  the  favor  of  Cardinal 
Wolsey.  As  a  poet,  he  began  in  the  French-Chaucerian  manner, 
but  he  possessed  little  gift  for  musical  lines,  and  his  genuine 
poetic  genius  had  to  find  vent  in  an  original  and  rugged  verse, 
rhymed,  alliterated,  or  what  not,  a  doggerel  to  this  day  called 


SKELTOX  73 

"Skeltonic,"  in  which  he  soars  and  sings,  or  as  Mr.  Saints- 
bury  puts  it/' crows   and  whoops,"  by  turns. 

"Though  my  ryme  be  ragged,  ^ 

Tattered  and  jagged, 
Rudely  rayne  beaten. 
Rusty  and  moughte  eaten; 
If  ye  take  well  thervvith, 
It  hath  in  it  some  pyth." 

His  fierce  satire,  the  matter  suiting  the  manner,  was  commonly 
directed  against  his  brother  clergymen.  Most  poetical  perhaps 
of  his  more  lyrical  attempts  is  Tlie  Bolce  of  Phijlli/p  Spuroive, 
a  lady's  alternately  pathetic  and  burlesque  lament  for  the 
death  of  a  pet  bird.  Only,  however,  in  occasional  passages, 
like  the  one  in  this  lament  beginning  " I  took  my  sampler  once," 
or  in  the  merest  snatches  like 

"Mirry  Margaret, 
As  mydsomer  flowre, 
Jentill  as  fawcoun 
Or  hawke  of  the  to  were," 

does  Skelton  rise  into  the  free  air  of  poetry.  On  England  the 
Muse  that  Chaucer  knew  still  looked  disdainful. 


PART  III 

MODERN  ENGLISH  PERIOD 

FROM   HSNRY    THE    EIGHTH    TO    THE    DEATH 
OF    VICTORIA 

li09-190t 


Already  in  Chaucer's  life  and  for  a  century  and  more  after 
his  death,  forces  were  at  work  which  were  to  change  the  character 
of  civiUzation  in  all  southern  and  western  Europe,  bringing  to  an 
end  the  middle  ages,  as  we  term  them,  and  ushering  in  the 
modern  world.  Three  things  had  characterized  mediaeval  life — 
feudalism,  scholasticism,  and  the  domination  of  the  Church; 
and  one  after  another  these  things  were  destined  to  pass.  The 
military  institution  of  feudalism,  which  rested  upon  the  superior 
power  of  the  mounted  mail-clad  knight  and  kept  the  masses  in 
subjection,  received  its  deathblow  at  Crecy  in  1346,  when  the 
English  yeomen  under  Edward  III.  proved  that  horses  and 
armor  were  no  match  for  their  long-bows.  Scholasticism 
which,  under  the  guidance  of  theology,  narrowed  intellectual 
interests  to  a  barren  logic  and  philosophy,  disappeared  before 
a  wave  of  broader  humanism.  In  Italy  the  revival  of  learning, 
led  by  Petrarch  and  Boccaccio,  had  introduced  the  change, 
and  at  the  period  at  which  we  have  now  arrived  this  Renais- 
sance, or  new  birth,  was  at  its  height,  with  the  ]Medici  ruling 
"in  Florence  and  fostering  the  art  and  literature  that  flowered 
in  the  creations  of  men  like  Raphael  and  ^Michelangelo. 
In  every  direction  the  thoughts  of  people  were  widened.  '  From 
Constantinople,  captured  by  the  Turks  in  1453,  Greek  scholars 
fled,  bringing  with  them  to  western  Europe  their  precious 
manuscripts.  Traders  penetrated  constantly  farther  eastward. 
Portuguese  mariners,  doubling  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope,  found 
a  waterway  to  India.  Columbus,  seeking  another  route  thither, 
found  a  new  world.  Copernicus  traced  the  path  of  the  earth 
itself  on  the  map  of  the  universe.  Printing  was  invented,  and 
the  revived  classical  poetry  and  philosophy,  together  with  the 
new  literature,  the  records  of  travel,  and  the  discoveries  of 
.science,  were  multiplied  and  scattered  broadcast,  bringing 
nation    into   touch   with    nation    and  age    with  age.     Finally, 

77 


78  THE    RENAISSANCE 

Luther  reanimated  the  heresies  of  Wyclif,  and  religious  new 
thought  was  added  to  new  art,  new  letters,  new  knowledge,  new 
hopes,  and  new  dreams. 

What  all  this  meant  to  letters ,  how  it  broadened  and  human- 
ized them,  may  be  imagined.  It  meant  that  a  drama  was  once 
more  possible  which  shouldbe  as  wide  as  life  and  as  deep  as  the 
springs  of  its  passions.  It  meant  that  poetry  should  become  the 
full  voice  of  the  joys  and  aspirations  of  the  individual,  the  expres- 
sion of  his  delight  in  the  world  of  reality  no  less  than  of  vision.  It 
meant  that  prose  itself  should  burst  its  monastic  bonds  and 
grapple  with  questions  of  universal  interest,  with  the  exploration 
of  the  physical  world,  with  the  government  of  states,  with  the 
purposes  and  progress  of  the  arts,  with  the  regulation  of  domes- 
tic and  private  life  for  material  comfort  and  well-being. 

England  shared  in  these  fresh  impulses,  but,  it  must  be 
confessed,  somewhat  tardily,  and  for  a  long  time  without 
giving  them  adequate  expression  in  her  literature.  In  that 
respect  her  greatness  was  only  preparing.  When  in  1400  her 
poet-spokesman  of  the  Middle  Age  was  laid  to  rest  in  Westmin- 
ster Abbey,  there  were  many  found  to  do  him  honor  but  none  to 
wear  his  robes.  Chaucer  was  simply  the  master,  whom  scholars 
and  readers  looked  back  to  in  loving  remembrance.  He  had 
settled!  beyond  the  possibility  of  further  question,  that  the  lan- 
guage which  the  people  of  London  used  in  the  transaction  of 
their  business  could  be  made  to  sing  their  joys  and  sorrows  no 
less  perfectly  than  French  or  Italian,  Latin  or  Greek.  But 
poetic  genius  was  lacking,  and  for  nearly  a  century,  as  we  have 
seen,  English  letters  passed  again  into  a  state  of  semi-darkness. 
Then  came  a  stir  that  betokened  dawn,  though  more  than  half 
a  century  was  .still  to  elapse  before  the  Elizabethan  day.  Through 
this  period,  however,  modern  English  was  steadily  emerging. 


CHAPTER  VII 


MORE 

Machiarelli, 

TYNDALE 

Ariosto 

LATIMER 

Michelangelo, 

ASCHAM 

Raphael,  Titian 

WYATT 

Erasmus 

SURREY 

Copernicus 

Luther,  Calvin 

Rabelais 

HENRY   VIII.    TO    ELIZABETH — THE    NEW   LEARNING 
THE    REFORMATION 

1509-1558 


Henry  VIII .1509-1547 

Fall  of  Wolsey 1529 

Papal  Supremacy  abolished  1534 
Suppression    of  Monasteries 

1536-1539 

Edward  VI 1547-1553 

Mary 1553-1558 


The  years  of  the  reign  of  Henry  VII.,  the  first  Tudor,  had 
been  spent  in  recovering  from  the  disastrous  Wars  of  the  Roses, 
and  when  Henry  VIII.  carue  to  the  throne  England  was  enjoying 
a  measure  of  prosperity.  Henry  himself,  and  his  prime  minister. 
Cardinal  Wolsey,  were,  until  the  time  of  their  unfortunate  quar- 
rels, liberal  patrons  of  tlie  New  Learning.  Many  grammar 
schools  were  founded.  Oxford  and  Cambridge  became  for  the 
moment  rivals  in  classical  scholarship  and  centres  of  philosophy 
and  eloquence.  The  poor  Dutch  scholar,  Erasmus,  in  despair 
of  ever  crossing  the  Alps,  came  to  England  for  the  Greek  for 
which  his  soul  thirsted,  and  in  return  impressed  his  own  generous 
culture  upon  the  age.  The  monastic  orders,  however,  at  one 
time  fosterers  of  learning,  were  now  mostly  sunk  in  indolence 
and  corruption,  and  resisted  the  new  movement.  Then  came 
Henry's  private  differences  with  the  Pope,  and  concurrently 
with  the  spread  of  Lutheran  doctrines  and  of  Scripture  reading 
among  the  people,  Henry  began  to  suppress  the  monasteries 
and  brought  about  the  breach  between  the  Church  of  England 
and  the  Church  of  Rome  which  was  the  ultimate  outcome  of  the 

79 


80  nEXRY  VIII.  TO  EUZABETn 

Reformation  in  England.  But  the  change  was  not  made  with- 
out violent  disturbances,  both  political  and  religious,  and  the  very 
forces  that  were  to  make  English  nationality  and  literature  great 
delayed  for  a  season  the  realization  of  that  end.  At  no  time,  for 
instance,  in  the  histor}'  of  England  had  there  been  such  a  whole- 
sale destruction  of  books  as  took  place  in  the  troubles  at  the  end 
of  Henry's  reign,  when,  among  hundreds  of  others,  the  great 
libraries  of  London  and  Oxford  totally  disappeared. 

So  far  as  literature  is  concerned,  the  tendencies  and  activ- 
ities of  the  time  may  be  briefly  described.  In  the  first  place, 
the  new  ideas  and  ideals  concerning  the  organization  of  society 

found  admirable  expression  in  a  book  that  has  been 
More,  p^,gj.  ^[j^(,^  regarded  as  a  classic.   This  is  the  Utopia 

Tindale  (1516)  of  Sir  Thomas  More,  perhaps  the  foremost 
Latimer.       Englishman  of  his  day,  a  man  who  paid  in  the  end 

with  his  life  for  his  steadfast  devotion  to  his  princi- 
ples. As  the  Utopia,  however,  was  written  in  Latin  and  was 
not  translated  for  many  years,  its  bearing  upon  English  liter- 
ature is  but  an  indirect  one.  In  the  second  place,  the  print- 
ing press  continued  to  encourage  English  prose  writing  and 
prose  translation.  Especially  noteworthy  is  the  translation 
of  the  French  Froissart  by  Lord  Berners  (1523),  which 
afforded  lovers  of  romance  scarcely  less  entertaining  read- 
ing in  genuine  history  than  they  could  get  in  Caxton's  stories  of 
Troy  or  Malory's  stories  of  the  Knights  of  the  Round  Table. 
In  the  third  place,  great  zeal  was  manifested  in  the  translation 
and  printing  of  the  Bible,  which  scholars  were  now  able  to  trans- 
late, not  as  formerly  from  the  Latin  Vulgate,  but  directly  from 
the  Greek  and  Hebrew.  AVilliam  Tyndale  's  version  of  the  New 
Testament,  which  has  had  such  a  profound  influence  upon  Eng- 
lish style,  appeared  in  1534,  and  Miles  Coverdale's  Bible  in  1535; 
and  in  1539  a  revision  of  the  two,  known  as  "The  Great  Bible," 
was  authorized  by  Henry  VIII.  In  1548  followed  the  English 
Prayer  Booh,  edited  by  Archbishop  Cranmer.  The  press  also 
ser\'ed  to  circulate  and  to  preserve  some  of  the  Sermons  of  Hugh 


ASCHAM  81 

Latimer,  bishop  aiul  preacher  to  the  kiiijr,  arui  a  master  of 
vigorous  Englisli. 

Naturally  this  accumulation  of  printed  prose  was  giving  the 
language  a  stability  it  had  never  yet  possessed.  Moreover,  the 
Midland  dialect  of  Wyclif  and  Chaucer,  standardized  and  nation- 
alized, especially  through  the  Bible,  was  now  become  practically 
the  modern  English  we  all  know.  With  the  disappearance  of 
final  e  from  pronunciation  went  almost  the  last  trace  of  Middle 
English  inflection;  and  though  the  vowels  were  still,  and  for  a 
long  time  to  come,  doubtless,  pronounced  more  after  the  old  way, 
the  English  as  written  was  modern  English,  and  there  is  no  suffi- 
cient reason  why  we  should  attempt  to  pronounce  it  otherwise 
than  as  we  do  to-day.*  The  vocabulary,  too,  had  begun  to  ex- 
pand after  the  liberal  fashion  that  marks  it  still,  drawing  freely 
on  every  source  that  could  serve  its  needs.  Such  expansion, 
indeed,  was  not  only  facilitated  by  the  multiplying  of  translations 
from  languages  both  ancient  and  modern,  but  was  actually  com- 
pelled by  the  inpouring  of  new  interests  and  ideas. f 

Further,  a  critical  tendency  was  beginning  to  manifest  itself, 

and  there  was  a  direct  and  conscious  attempt  to  improve  and 

control  the  language  for  literary  purposes.    Philology 

oger  ^^^^  composition  were  discussed,  and  Rhetorics  writ- 

1515- 156S    *'^"*     Conspicuous  among  men  of  this  critical  and 

pedagogical  bent  was  a  Cambridge  professor,  and 

tutor  of  the  young  Princess  Elizabeth,  Roger  Ascham,  whose 

written  prose  possessed  real  distinction.     His  jealousy  for  the 

honor  of  the  English  tongue  was  shown  in  his  Toxo'philus  (1545), 

a  book  on  archery  dedicated  to  Henry  VIH.,  which  he  refused 

to  write  in  Latin  or  (ireek,  proud  to  present  his  "Englishe  matter 

*The  spelling  of  extracts  used  henceforth  in  the  present  book  will  be 
modernized,  except  in  the  case  of  Spenser,  who  was  intentionally  archaic,  ;ind 
in  a  very  few  other  instances. 

t  Tyndale's  Bible,  for  instance,  as  compared  with  Wyclif's,  gives  evidence 
of  this  expansion  in  such  innovations  as  superscription  for  writing  above,  tribute 
tox  rent, physician  for  leech,  congregation  for  church,  doctrine  for  teaching,  iniquity 
for  wickedness,  eternal  for  crerlasting,  provoked  to  anger  for  stirred  to  wrath. 
See  Appendix. 


82  HENRY  VIII.  TO  ELIZABETH 

in  the  Englishc  tongue  for  Englislie  men."  His  Scholemastcr 
(1570),  a  treatise  on  the  discipline  of  youth,  on  teaching  Latin, 
and  on  versification,  was  not  pubUshed  till  after  his  death.  It  is 
remarkable  for  its  advanced  views  on  education,  both  in  counsel- 
ling that  appeals  should  be  made  rather  to  the  pupil's  interest 
than  to  his  fear  of  a  flogging,  and  in  substituting  a  general  cul- 
ture of  the  mind  and  body  for  the  mechanical  instillation  of  life- 
less rules. 

Finally,  in  the  field  of  j)oetry,  an  influence  began  now  to  be 
dominant  which  was  to  play  a  part  in  the  shaping  of  the  litera- 
ture down  to  the  end  of  the  century.  This  was  the  influence  of 
Italian  writers,  with  the  classical  standards  behind  them.  Just 
why  that  influence,  which  Chaucer  had  felt  so  long  before  and 
certainly  to  the  great  enrichment  of  his  own  work,  should  have 
failed  to  spread  earlier,  is  not  easy  to  say.  Perhaps  the  lack  of 
printing  was  a  prime  reason.  Perhaps  also  the  native  resistance 
was  too  strong,  or  the  native  obtuseness  too  great,  for  there  were 
not  wanting  those  who  regretted  the  foreign  influence,  as  tend- 
ing to  retard  native  literature.  But  continental  literature 
and  thought  were  far  ahead  of  the  English,  and  fresh  draughts 
from  that  source  could  not  but  be  invigorating.  Moreover,  such 
attempts  at  a  strictly  native  expression  as  Skelton's  had  not  been 
encouraging;  it  is  clear  that  in  the  matter  of  form  English 
writers  needed  further  foreign  schooling,  before  Spenser  and 
Shakespeare  were  possible.  The  two  poets  entitled  to  most  of 
whatever  credit  is  due  for  the  introduction  of  Italian  and  classical 
models  were  Sir  Thomas  Wyatt  and  the  Earl  of  Surrey. 

Thomas  Wyatt,  a  Cambridge  Master  of  Arts  at  seventeen, 
knighted  at  thirty-four,  and  dead  before  forty,  led  the  typical 
life  of  a  courtier  of  the  time,  one  year  in  disfavor  and 
,„  *  in  prison,  and  another  year  on  active  embassies  for 
1603?'- 1542.  *^^  king.  Henry  Howard,  Earl  of  Surrey,  a  friend 
and  poetic  pupil  of  Wyatt's,  led  an  idle  but  honorable 
and  lamentably  brief  life  at  court,  being  beheaded  on  a  foolish 
charge  of  treason  in  his  thirtieth  year,  only  nine  days  before 


WYAIT  AND  SURREY  83 

the  king's  o^frn  death.     The  fruits  of  these  two  men's  literary 

activity  are  best  considered  together.     They  were  pubHshed, 

though   not   until  just  before  EHzabeth's  accession. 

o  in  a  collection  of  verse  called    Totter^   Miscelkint/, 

Surrey,  c.  ,        ,  "" 

Jfj  17-7547.  J^-'^^,  a  book  and  a  date,  which,  it  should  be  borne 
in  mind,  publicly  open  the  new  era  in  English  poetry. 
The  contributions  of  the  two  consist,  on  Wyatt's  part,  of  love 
lyrics  in  sonnet  and  various  stanza  forms,  and  satires;  on  Sur- 
rey's, of  similar  sonnets  and  lyrics,  and  a  translation  of  two 
books  of  Virgil's  JEneid. 

The  love  poems,  personal  in  tone,  and  often  composed  seri- 
ally, constituting  a  kind  of  diary  of  love,  either  real  or  fictitious, 
were  something  new  in  English  literature  and  set  a  fashion  that 
lasted  through  and  long  after  Elizabeth's  reign.  The  model 
was  obtained  from  Italy,  where  both  men  had  travelled  and 
studied  poetry.  "The  Lover  Describeth  his  Restless  State," 
"The  Lover  Praiseth  the  Beauty  of  his  Lady's  Hand,"  "The 
Lover  Curseth  the  Time  when  first  he  Fell  in  Love," — such  are 
the  themes  upon  which  the  amatory  changes  are  rung.  The 
fashion  is  particularly  interesting  to  us  because  it  brought  with 
it  the  fourteen-line  sonnet,  which  of  all  borrowed  forms  has  taken 
most  kindly  to  English  conditions,  yielding  some  of  our  very 
greatest  poetry.  The  sonnet-form,  however,  was  not  conquered 
without  a  struggle.  Chaucer's  mastery  of  the  ten-syllable  (or 
five-foot)  line  seems  not  to  have  assisted  Wyatt,  who  labored  at 
a  translation  of  one  of  Petrarch's  sonnets  after  this  fashion : 

"The  long  |  love  that  |  in  my  |  thought  1 1  harber 
And  in  |  my  heart  |  doth  keep  |  his  re  |  sidence. 
Into  I  my  face  !  presseth  ]  with  bold  1  pretence, 
And  there  |  campeth  |  display  |  ing  his  |  banner,"  etc. 

This  is  very  literally  a  "sad  mechanic  exercise."  Surrey's  at- 
tempt at  the  same  sonnet  reveals  great  metrical  improvement, 
though  he  takes  liberties  with  the  rhyme  order: 

' '  Love,  that  liveth  and  reigneth  in  my  thought. 
That  built  his  seat  within  my  captive  breast; 


84  HENKY   VIII.   TO   P:i.lZA»KTH 

Clad  in  the  arms  wherein  witli  me  he  fought, 
Oft  in  my  face  he  doth  his  baimer  rest,"  etc. 

Either  is  very  far  from  the  mellifluous  numbers  of  Shakespeare  or 
even  of  Sidney,  but  the  lesson  ha<l  to  be  learned  at  somebody 's 
cost.  Surrey  at  his  best,  it  should  be  said,  considerably  im- 
proves upon  the  above  lines. 

More  important  still  was  a  second  feat  in  pioneering,  the 
glory  of  which  belongs  to  Surrey  alone.  This  was  his  use  of  the 
iambic  five-foot  unrhymed  verse — blank  verse— in  his  translation 
of  the  /Eneid.  It  may  seem  a  small  thing  for  him  to  have;  taken 
the  ordinary  five-foot  line  which  he  was  using  in  his  sonnets,  and 
which  Chaucer  had  already  proved  the  virtues  of  in  couplets  and 
otherwise,  and  simply  omit  the  rhyme.  But  it  was  no  small 
thing  to  throw  away  thus  every  musical  device  but  metre  and 
.still  achieve  poetry.     Surrey  did  not  always  do  the  latter. 

"Aurora  now  from  Titan's  purple  bod 
With  new  daj'light  had  overspread  the  earth ; 
When  by  her  windows  the  Queen  the  peeping  day 
Espied,  and  navy  with  'splay'd  sails  depart 
The  shore,  and  eke  the  port  of  vessels  void," — 

these  are  not  the  sort  of  lines  we  are  used  to  now.  But  the  begin- 
ning was  made.  The  instrument  was  rudely  forged  which  in 
fifty  years  was  to  be  shaped  into  the  very  greatest  instrument  of 
English  poetry  and  wielded  by  the  greatest  [)oet  of  all  time. 


IXTERCHAPTER 


THE    ELIZABETHAN    AGE 
AGE   OF    SPENSEK,  SHAKESPEARE,   AXP  BACON 

1558-1625 


Elizabeih  queen 1568-1603 

Act  of  Supremacy 1569 

Colony  of  Virginia  (Raleigh)  loSo 
Execution   of  Mary    Queen 

of  Scots loS7 

Defeat  of  the    Spanish    Ar- 
mada   loSS 

James  1 1603-1626 

Gunpoicder  Plot 1605 

Colony  at  Jamestown lH(y7 

Pilgrim  Fathers  in  Netc  Eng- 
land   1620 


SPENSER 

SIDNEY 

MABLOWB 

SHAKBSPEABE 

JONSON 

BEAUMONT  AND 

FLETCHER 
WEBSTER 
LYLY 
HOOKER 
BACON 
BURTON 
KING  JAMES  BIBLE 


William  of  Orange 

Philip  II.  of  Spain 

Mercator 

Galileo 

Kepler 

Tasso 

Montaigne 

Cervantes 

Lope  de  Vega 

Rubens 


The  Roman  Catholic  reaction  under  Mary  restored  for 
a  time  the  old  relations  between  the  English  Parliament  and 
the  Papacy,  but  it  could  not  restore  religious  harmony  nor  re- 
press violence,  and  when  Elizabeth  came  to  the  throne  in  1558, 
England's  affairs  were  in  a  sad  condition.  Elizabeth,  however, 
was  precisely  the  woman  to  steer  the  middle  course  through 
which  alone  lay  the  way  to  safety  and  peace.  Her  sympathies 
were  neither  with  Rome,  nor  with  the  extreme  reformers,  soon 
to  be  known  as  Puritans,  who  would  have  abolished  every  trace 
of  Catholicism  in  their  worship.  In  a  liberal  spirit,  slowly  but 
surely,  she  worked  her  reforms,  and  when,  thirty  years  later, 
the  ambitious  Philip  II.  of  Spain  was  defeated  with  the  loss  of 
his  Armada,  the  ind(;pendencc  of  the  English  Church  on  a 
middle  basis  was  securely  established  by  the  same  blow  that 
determined  the  political  greatness  of  the  nation. 

85 


86  THE   ELIZABETHAN   AGE 

It  is  difficult  for  historians  to  record  dispassionately  the 
glories  of  Elizabeth's  long  reign,  an  age  that  justly  challenges 
comparison  with  the  age  of  Pericles  in  Greece,  of  Augustus  in 
Rome,  or  of  the  De'  Medici  in  Florence.  It  was  then  that  the 
full  effects  of  the  Renaissance  and  the  Reformation  were  at 
length  felt  in  the  island  kingdom.  All  classes  of  people  were 
seized  with  a  noble  restlessness  and  curiosity  which  were  the 
precursors  of  great  achievements.  Venturesome  mariners  like 
Drake,  and  traders  like  Jenkinson,  explored  the  farthest  comers 
of  the  earth  and  brought  back  wealth  and  tales  of  wonder  from 
Muscovy,  China,  and  Peru.  Statesmen  like  Burleigh  fostered 
prosperity  at  home.  Courtiers  like  Sidney  and  Raleigh  added 
the  graces  of  culture  to  the  virtues  of  bravery  and  made  Eliza- 
beth's court  as  resplendent  as  it  was  powerful.  Queen  Elizabeth 
herself  was  a  mistress  of  nearly  every  polite  accomplishment 
from  Greek  and  Italian  to  dancing  and  archery,  loved  study, 
loved  music,  loved  pageants  and  pastimes,  and  assisted  in  all 
ways  in  the  re-quickening  of  life  that  was  going  on  about  her. 
Finally,  poets  and  philosophers  were  not  wanting  with  the  genius 
to  respond  to  the  spirit  of  the  age,  to  reflect  its  temper  and  minis- 
ter to  its  ideals.  There  were  Spenser,  Shakespeare,  Bacon,  and 
Jonson,  any  one  of  whom  would  have  made  the  age  illustrious, 
besides  many  others  so  richly  endowed  that  only  the  greatness 
of  these  four  has  overshadowed  their  names. 

It  will  be  noted  that  the  Elizabethan  Age,  as  defined  in  litera- 
ture, does  not  exactly  coincide  with  Elizabeth's  reign.  Some 
twenty  years  from  the  time  of  her  accession  must  be  regarded 
as  still  preliminary,  and  then  some  twenty  years  must  be  al- 
lowed after  her  death  before  the  generation  headed  by  the 
mighty  four  had  spent  its  force.  The  new  j)oetry,  we  have  seen, 
was  actually  introduced  in  1557  by  the  publication  of  TottcVs 
Miscellany,  which  contained  especially  numerous  specimens  of 
both  Wyatt's  and  Surrey's  verse;  but  though  it  proved  highly 
popular  with  readers  it  did  not  at  once  stimulate  any  productions 
of  importance.     Perhaps  only  Thomas  Sackville,  Lord  Buck- 


Bun  Jonson 
EnMiT^n  Spenser 


^vli.liam  shakf»pea.re 
Fk-vnois  Racon 


THE    ELIZABETHAN   AGE  87 

hurst,  showed  in  these  first  years  noteworthy  individuahty;  and 
his  stately  and  solemn  Induction  (1563),  in  rhyme  royal,  with  its 
vision  of  the  realms  of  the  dead, — 

"The  large  great  kingdoms,  and  the  dreadful  reign 
Of  Pluto  in  his  throne  where  he  did  dwell, 
The  wide  waste  places,  and  the  hugy  plain," — 

recalls  Lydgate  almost  as  nmch  as  it  anticipates  Spenser.  But 
production  was  not  suspended.  John  Foxe's  great  Book  of 
Martyrs  (printed  in  English,  in  1563)  fiixed  the  terrible  lessons  of 
Mary's  reign;  translations  from  the  classics  multiplied;  masques 
and  little  plays  for  the  queen's  progresses  and  other  ceremonials 
were  written;  tales,  translated  from  the  Italian  and  published 
in  collections,  like  William  Painter's  Palace  of  Pleasure  (1566), 
became  extremely  popular;  and  the  affected  verses  of  the  swarm 
of  minor  poets  were  gathered  into  further  miscellaneous  collec- 
tions, such  as  the  Paradise  of  Dainty  Devices  in  1576.  Then, 
in  1579,  with  the  appearance  of  Spenser's  Sliepheardes  Calender 
the  great  age  was  fairly  begun. 


THE  TOWKR  OF*  I^OJs'nOX  IX    1507. 

This  ancient  fortress,  standing  on  the  north  bank  of  the  Thames,  was  much 
used  as  a  royal  residence  before  the  time  of  Elizabeth  and  was  the  scene  of 
some  of  the  most  Important  events  In  English  history— the  murder,  for  in- 
stance, of  the  infant  King  Edward  V.  and  his  younger  brother  Richard. 
Elizabeth  was  once  confined  here.  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  went  from  here  to  his 
execution  in  Old  Palace  Yard,  Westminster.  Wyatt.  Surrey,  Latimer,  Bacon, 
and  other  distinguished  authors  were  at  various  times  conlined  within  its 
precincts. 


88 


CHAPTER  Yin 

ELIZABETHAN    POETRY 

SPENSER    SIDNEY    THE  SONNETEERS 

Edmund  Spenser  is  to  be  regarded  as  one  of  the  courtier 
group  who  surrounded    Elizabeth,  though    he  spent    much   of 
his  life  out  of  England.     The  precise  kind  of  pre- 
„  ferment  and  patronage  which  his  talents  should  have 

1552-1599  ^^^"  ^^^  ^^'™  never  came.  He  was  born,  probably 
in  1552,  in  eastern  London,  in  sight  equally  of  green 
fields  and  of  the  ancient  castellated  Tower.  From  a  gram- 
mar school  he  went  to  Cambridge,  where  he  partly  worked  his 
way,  taking  the  master's  degree  after  seven  years'  residence. 
Shortly  after  this,  on  a  visit  to  the  north,  he  seems  to  have  been 
captivated  by  the  charms  of  one  "Rosalind,"  whose  indifference 
inspired  some  of  the  plaintive  verses  oHhe  Shepheardes  Calender . 
The  publication  of  this  in  1579  was  the  beginning  of  his  career 
as  a  poet.  About  the  same  time  he  became  an  inmate  of  the 
great  house  of  Leicester,  and  a  friend  of  Leicester's  nephew,  Sir 
Philip  Sidney.  Thenceforward,  whether  for  good  or  bad,  his 
life  was  to  be  spent  almost  entirely  in  the  turbulent  country  of 
Ireland,  whither  he  went  as  a  secretary  of  the  Lord-Deputy.  He 
was  granted  the  estate  of  Kilcolman  Castle,  married  an  Irish 
lady,  whose  name,  Elizabeth,  he  has  celebrated  in  one  of  his 
sonnets  together  with  his  mother's  and  his  queen's,  and  settled 
down  to  a  life  of  semi-banishment,  relieved  only  by  several  jour- 
neys to  London,  or  by  the  occasional  visit  of  a  friend  like  Sir 
Walter  Raleigh.  In  1598  Ireland  was  in  open  rebellion;  Kilcol- 
man was  burned,  and  Spenser  had  to  flee  with  his  family  to 
I/ondon,  where  he  died  at  the  lieginning  of  the  following  year. 


90  ELIZABETHAN    POETRY 

The  ShepJieardes  Calender  is  scarcely  in  itself  a  great  pocui, 
but  besides  its  promise  of  the  very  great  poetry  soon  to  be,  it 
,,  „,  contained  some  fulfilment  of  the  promise  that  for 

heardes  more  than  twenty  years   had   already  been.     Colin 

C'llrntler,"  Clout,  the  shepherd's  boy  of  the  January  Eclogue, 
1379.  who, 

"  When  winters  wastfull  spight  was  ahnost  spent, 
All  in  a  sunshino  day,  a«  did  befall, 
Led  forth  his  fiocke  that  had  bene  long  y-pent," 

was  unconsciously  emblematic  of  Spenser  himself  leading  forth 
to  the  sunshine  these  firstlings  of  the  new  poetry.  There  are 
twelve  Eclogues,  or  pastoral  poems,  in  the  "calender,"  one  for 
each  month  of  the  year.  Ten  are  in  the  form  of  dialogues,  in 
which  shepherds,  lounging  in  sun  or  shade,  discuss  love  or  poli- 
tics, or  hold  singing  matches  after  the  fashion  of  the  shepherds 
in  Virgil  and  Theocritus.  The  rustic  background  is  genuine 
and  interesting,  and  though  the  songs  and  satire  sound  artificial 
on  the  lips  of  "Hobbinol"  and  "Piers,"  they  are  in  themselves 
the  genuine  work  of  a  poet  happy  to  find  any  excuse  for  the  exer- 
cise of  his  gift.  Their  freshness  and  melody,  the  variety  of 
themes  which  they  display,  and  the  mastery  over  a  wide  range  of 
forms,  from  rugged,  clownish  verse  to  the  most  difficult  of  intri- 
cately rhymed  stanzas,  mark  them  off  from  anything  that  had 
been  seen  since  the  days  of  Chaucer.  Afterward  Spenser  at- 
tained his  highest  lyrical  reach  in  two  hymns,  the  Epithalamion 
(written  for  his  own  marriage)  and  the  Prothalamion,  which 
contend  with  each  other  for  the  honor  of  being  the  noblest  mar- 
riage hymns  in. any  literature. 

"Come  now,  ye  damzels,  daughters  of  delight, 
Helpe  quickly  her  to  dight: 

But  first  come  ye  fayre  Houres,  which  wore  bogot 
In  .loves  sweet  paradice  of  Day  and  Night;  .  .  . 
And  ye  three  handmayds  of  the  Cyprian  Queene, 
The  which  doe  still  adorne  her  beauties  pride, 
Helpe  to  adorne  my  beautifullest  bride. 


SPENSER  91 

And,  as  ye  her  array,  still  throw  betweene  . 
Some  graces  to  be  seene; 
And,  as  ye  use  to  Venus,  to  her  sing, 
The  whiles  the  woods  shal  answer,  and  your  eccho  ring." 

(Epithalaimon,  Stanza  6.) 

These  products,  however,  are  minor  as  compared  with  the 

very  great  one  which  is  now  almost  synonymous  with  Spenser's 

name.     The  Faerie  Queene  is  one  of  those  works 

,,  ,,       that  could  scarcely  have  come  out  of  any  age  but  the 

Queene,  .  -'  •         i      •  i 

1590-1596      Elizabethan.      Spenser  had  been  revolvmg  the  idea 

of  it  for  several  years,  and  after  he  was  established 
m  Ireland  he  took  up  the  congenial  task  of  composition.  He  was 
by  nature  a  lover  of  pomp  and  splendor  and  a  dreamer  upon  the 
romantic  deeds  of  bygone  days;  he  admired  courage  and  hated 
cowardice;  he  loved  beauty  and  nobility  of  character  no  less  than 
beauty  of  physical  form;  his  imagination,  too,  was  filled  with 
pictures  in  which  these  abstractions  seemed  almost  real,  and  his 
facility  for  metre  and  rhyme  prompted  poetic  expression.  Ac- 
cordingly, with  the  models  of  the  great  Italian  romantic  epics 
before  him,  Ariosto's  Orlando  Furioso  and  Tasso's  lately  pub- 
lished Jerusalem  Delivered,  he  planned  an  intricate  tale  of  chiv- 
alry in  which  he  might  give  a  like  full  play  to  his  fancy  and 
embody  his  loftier  ideals  of  beauty  and  truth. 

When  three  Books,  of  twelve  Cantos  each,  were  finished, 
Raleigh  saw  the  poem  and  urged  him  to  take  it  to  London  and 
the  queen.  The  result  was  that  this  portion  was  published  in 
1590  with  a  fitting  dedication  "To  the  most  mightie  and  mag- 
nificent Empresse  Elizabeth."  There  were  to  have  been  twelve 
Books  in  all — indeed,  Spenser  even  contemplated  twenty-four — 
but  only  three  more  were  completed,  and  the  six  were  published 
together  six  years  later,  making  a  volume  of  nearly  twice  the  bulk 
of  the  Canterbury  Talcs.  The  whole  poem  was  planned  w-ith 
allegorical  intent,  to  set  forth  the  twelve  moral  virtues,  for  which 
the  Books  are  respectively  named.  Thus  the  Knight  of  the  Red 
Cross  represents  Holiness;  Sir  Guyon,  Temperance;  Britomart, 


92  ELIZABETHAN    POETRY 

Ch.^stity;  Camhol  aiul  Triiimonrl,  Frionrlsliip;  Artp^al,  Justire; 
and  Sir  Cali(lf>r(>,  Courtesy.  Each  Knight  perfoniis  deeds  in 
vindication  of  his  special  virtue  and  for  the  glory  of  the  Queen. 
IJesides  these  there  are  Prince  Arthur,  f)r  Magnificence,  the  per- 
fection of  all  virtues;  (rloriarui  herself,  the  (^ucen of  Faerie"";  and 
a  throng  of  lesser  characters,  such  as  Una,  or  Truth;  Duessa,  or 
Falsehood;  Archimago,  a  magician;  giants,  satyrs,  nymphs,  etc. 
Where  story  and  allegory  are  so  closely  interwoven,  it  is  not  always 
possible  to  follow  either  clearly.  The  allegory  at  times  becomes 
double  or  even  threefold,  taking  on  a  religious  and  political 
significance.  Queen  Elizabeth  herself  is  shadowed  behind  the 
Faerie  Queene.  But  there  is  no  difficulty  in  deciphering  the 
large  pur[)Ose  of  the  potnn,  namely,  to  set  forth  the  pattern  of  a 
|)erfect  gentleman,  schooled  by  trials  and  temptations,  and  prac- 
tised in  every  Christian  virtue.  'Fhe  poet's  own  character  is 
unmistakably  revealed  in  every  passage  that  breathes  love  of 
good,  or  hatred  of  evil,  or  sensitiveness  to  suffering  and  sorrow. 

"Nought  is  there  under  heav'ns  wide  hollownnssc, 
That  moves  more  dcare  compassion  of  mind, 
Than  beautie  brought  t'unworthic  wrotchodriosse 
Through  envies  snares,  or  fortunes  frcakes  unkind. 
I,  whether  lately  through  her  brightnos  blynd, 
Or  through  alleageance,  and  fast  fealty, 
Which  I  do  owe  unto  all  womankynd, 
Feclc  my  hart  perst  with  so  great  agony, 
When  such  I  see,  that  all  for  pitty  I  could  dy. 

"And  now  it  is  empassioned  so  dcepc. 
For  fairest  Unacs  sake,  of  whom  I  sing, 
That  my  fraylc  eies  these  lines  with  teares  do  steepe. 
To  thinkc  how  she  through  guylcful  handcling, 
Though  true  as  touch,  though  daughter  of  a  king, 


*By  the  wonl  Fni-'rie  .Spenser  means  only  to  iniiicat«  the  purely  Inuiginary 
character  of  the  Queen  and  her  realm.  His  story  has  nothing  to  do  with  fairies 
in  our  sense  of  the  word,  and  almost  nothing  to  do  with  stock  legendary  tales. 
The  young  Prince  Arthur  Is  the  same  that  became  the  legendary  British  king, 
but  the  atmosphere  is  much  more  that  of  Ariosto's  and  Tasso's  poems  than 
that  of  the  Round  Table  legends.  A  few  incidents  are  borrowed  from  those  two 
writers;  the  rest  Is  mostly  Spenser's  invention. 


SPENSEI^  93 

Though  fairo  as  over  living  wight  was  fayro, 
Though  nor  in  word  nor  dcedo  ill  meriting, 
Is  from  her  knight  divorced  in  despayre, 
And  her  dew  loves  deryv'd  to  that  vile  witches  shayre. 

"Yet  she,  most  faithful!  Ladie,  all  this  while 
Forsaken,  wofull,  solitarie  mayd, 
Far  from  all  peoples  preace,  as  in  exile. 
In  wildernesse  and  wastfull  deserts  strayd, 
To  seeke  her  knight;  who,  subtily  betrayd 
Through  that  late  vision  which  th '  Enchaunter  wrought, 
Had  her  abandond.     She,  of  nought  affrayd, 
Through  woods  and  wastnes  wide  him  daily  sought; 
Yet  wished  tydinges  none  of  him  unto  her  brought." 

(I.,  iii.,  1-:^.) 

And  when  at  sight  of  this  same  forlorn  virgin  a  savage  Hon  forgets 
his  fury  and  falls  to  licking  her  hands  and  follows  her  as  a  pro- 
tector, the  poet  is  moved  to  exclaim 

"O  how  can  beautie  maister  the  most  strong, 
And  simple  truth  subdue  avenging  wrong?" 

It  may  be  doubted,  however,  w  hether  this  is  what  the  world 
most  cares  about  in  Spenser.  The  everlasting  beauty  of  good- 
ness and  truth  has  never,  it  may  be,  been  more  nobly  or  sincerely 
sung,  yet  there  is  one  thing  that  comes  to  the  front  in  this  poem 
even  more  insistently  than  this,  and  that  is  the  imperishable 
charm  of  beauty  itself.  In  oth(;r  words,  the  moral  apj)eal  of  the 
poetry  is  not,  in  the  end,  so  great  as  the  iesthetic.  The  poem  Is 
the  greatest  picture  gallery  in  literature.  Passages  of  vigor  or 
sublimity  are  not  often  to  be  found.  The  description  of  the  visit 
of  Dues.sa  to  the  realm  of  "griesly  Night"  in  the  fifth  Canto  of 
the  first  Book,  is  an  exceptional,  though  striking,  instance.  But 
passages  of  beauty  literally  spangle  the  pages,  revealing  the 
poet's  worship  of  every  form  of  loveliness. 

Of  the  same  pervading  character  is  the  melody  of  his  lan- 
guage, which  only  those  ears  attuned  to  the  music  of  per- 
fectly  married    words   can    wholly  appreciate.     He  purposely 


94  ELIZABETHAN'  POETJIT 

employed  a  somewhat  archaic  diction,  charming  in  itself,  and 
he  invented  the  stanza,  which  now  bears  his  name,  and  which 
for  "linked  sweetness  long  drawn  out"  has  never  been  surpassed. 
"The  joyouH  birdes,  .shrouded  in  choarcfuU  sluwle, 
Their  notes  unto  the  voice  attempnid  .sweet; 
Th'  AngeHcall  s<jft  trembling  voycf^s  made 
To  th'  in.struments  divine  respondence  meet; 
The  silver  sounding  instruments  did  meet 
With  the  base  murmure  of  the  waters  fall ; 
The  waters  fall  with  difference  discreet, 
Now  soft,  now  loud,  unto  the  wind  did  call; 
The  gentle  warbling  wind  low  answered  to  all." 

(II.,  xii..  71.) 

Thus,  through  story  after  story  for  nearly  four  thousand  stanzas, 
the  limpid  liquid  lines  flow  on  with  scarcely  a  fall  or  eddy.  And 
so  they  might  have  flowed,  to  the  end  of  the  vast  design ;  for  the 
power  to  see  and  the  power  to  sing  were  equally  unfailing.  This, 
<loubtless,  is  why  Hazlitt  called  Spen.ser  the  mo.st  poetical  of  all 
Knglish  poets;  and  this  is  why  he  has  had  more  influence  upon 
poets  for  the  la.st  three  centuries  than  even  Shakespeare  himself. 
Sir  Philip  Sidney,  who.se  early  and  heroic  death  at  the  battle 
of  Zutphen  surrounded  his  memory  with  a  romantic  charm,  has 

always  been  looked  back  to  as  the  flower  of  knight- 
Philip  .  .  . 

„.,  ^  hood,  the  embodiment  of  tho.se  ideals  of  chivalry  and 

aidney,  .  .      .  •' 

1554-1586  ^'u'ture  .so  fostered  by  his  age.  His  literary  accom- 
plishments have  part  in  this  character  and  give  him 
a  place  .second  to  Spen.ser  in  the  middle  years  of  Elizabeth's  reign. 
'^Though  his  works  were  not  published  till  after  his  death,  and 
though  they  reflect  plainly  enough  the  prevailing  Italian  and 
Spanish  ta.ste,  their  influence  in  turn  upon  the  English  literature 
of  his  own  and  the  next  generation  is  scarcely  to  be  estimated. 
He  wrote,  in  some  of  the  best  prose  since  Ascham's  Scholemaster, 
a  Defence  of  Poemj;  he  wrote  also,  in  a  less  careful  style,  a  long 
prose-poetical  romance,  Arcadia  (published  1590),  full  of  mere 
prettiness  and  conceits,  but  full  also  of  wit,  as  the  age  termed 
it,    and    invention.     His  poetry,   however,  ranks   higher    than 


THE  SONNETEERS  95 

these.  The  Astrophel  and  Stella  sonnets  were  published  in 
1591.  Neither  the  date  nor  the  order  of  their  writing  can 
be  exactly  determined,  but  they  record  subjectively  the  his- 
tory of  Sidney's  love  for  a  daughter  of  the  house  of  Essex  whom 
fate  did  not  permit  him  to  marry.  By  "Stella"  is  meant  this 
Penelope  Devereux,  the  star  of  his  life,  and  "Astrophel"  is  him- 
self, the  lover  of  the  star.*  In  the  first  of  the  sonnets  is  the  famous 
command  of  the  Muse  to  the  poet,  "Look  in  thy  heart,  and 
write."  Any  one  sonnet  will  give  a  most  imperfect  conception 
of  the  depth  and  strength  of  this  impassioned  journal  of  love, 
but  it  is  also  true  that  any  one  of  the  better  sonnets  will  by  itself 
arrest  more  than  a  passing  attention. 

"Stella,  think  not  that  I  by  verse  seek  fame. 
Who  seek,  who  hope,  who  love,  who  live  but  thee; 
Thine  eyes  my  pride,  thy  lips  mine  history : 
If  thou  praise  not,  all  other  praise  is  shame. 
Nor  so  ambitious  am  I,  as  to  frame 
A  nest  for  my  young  praise  in  laurel  tree: 
In  truth,  I  swear  I  wish  not  there  should  be 
Graved  in  my  epitaph  a  Poet's  name. 
Nor,  if  I  would,  could  I  just  title  make, 
That  any  laud  thereof  to  me  should  grow, 
Without  my  plumes  from  others'  wings  I  take: 
For  nothing  from  my  wit  or  will  doth  flow. 
Since  all  my  words  thy  beauty  doth  indite. 
And  Love  doth  hold  my  hand,  and  makes  me  write." 

(Sonnet  xc.) 

Sonnets  like  this,  though  seldom  better  than  this,  arranged 

in  series  and  addressed,  like  the  sonnets  of  Petrarch  to  Laura,  to 

a  real  or  imaginary  mistress,  some  Coelia,  or  Delia, 

.  or  Diana,  or  Phillis,  were  written  in  great  numbers 

after  the  time  of  Sidney's  death.     Nearly  every  poet, 

including  Spenser  and  Shakespeare,  fell  into  the  fashion.    Many 

of  these  writers  are  now  remembered  only  for  having  adopted 

♦The  name  "PhiUp  Sidney"  yields  "Philisides,"  that  Is,  star-lover 
(Greek  phUeo,  Latin  sidus) ;  or,  by  substituting  another  word  for  star  {astron), 
"Philaster,"  or  "Astrophil,"  or  "Astrophel."  Anagrammatic  disguises  of 
this  kind  were  a  part  of  the  fantastic  poetic  methods  of  the  time. 


96  ELIZABETHAX    POETRY 

the  fashion;  as  for  Spenser,  his  Amoretti  .htv  certainly  of  worth, 
but  his  genius  was  too  expansive,  and  his  manner  too  diffuse, 
for  entire  success  in  this  kind;  of  Shakespeare  more  will  be  said 
in  the  proper  place.  But  both  the  fashion  and  the  product 
are  among  the  phenomena  of  the  age.  Something  there  is 
in  these  sonnets  at  their  best,  a  certain  high  .style,  or  better, 
loftiness  of  tone,  which,  every  time  we  recur  to  them,  im- 
presses us  afresh,  because  the  something  has  not  been  native 
to  any  poet  since,  nor  has  it  ever  been  successfully  imitated. 
It  is  a  compound,  evidently,  of  real  poetic  feeling  and  a  highly 
|>erfected,  conventional  art,  but  the  secret  of  the  combination 
has  perished,  and  the  poets  and  the  poetr}',  even  when  they 
fell  short  of  genius,  remain  unique. 

Sonnets  there  were,  too,  in  another  sense,  little 
Miscellane-  gQugg^  outbursts  of  pure  melody,  drenching  the  liter- 

'    ature  of  the  times  as  with  Castalian  waters.     Thev 
etc. 

gushed  forth  everywhere.     I-<yly's  charming 

"Cupid  and  my  Campaspe  played 
At  cards  for  kisses ;  Cupid  paid," 

was  part  of  a  children's  comedy  played  before  the  queen  on  a 
New  Year's  night.     Greene's 

"Oh,  what  is  love?     It  is  a  pretty  thing, 
As  sweet  unto  a  shepherd  as  a  king; 
And  sweeter,  too," 

appeared  in  a  prose  pamphlet.     Lodge's 

"Love  in  my  bosom,  like  a  bee. 
Doth  suck  his  sweet," 

was  embedded  in  his  pastoral  romance  of  Rosalynde  (1590).  ^lar- 
lowe's  "Come  live  with  me,  and  be  my  love,"  was  one  of  the 
songs  included  in  a  poetic  miscellany,  The  Passionate  Pilgrim 
(1599),  The  numerous  songs  in  Shakespeare's  dramas,  "Hark, 
hark!  the  lark,"  "Under  the  greenwood  tree,"  "When  icicles 
hang  by  the  wall,"  "Come  away,  come  away,  death,"  "Where 
the  bee  sucks,  there  suck  I,"  "Take,  O,  take  those  lips  away," 


THE    SONNETEERS  97 

"Full  fathom  five  thy  father  lies,"  "How  should  I  your  true  love 
know,"  each  bearing  some  touch  of  his  indefinable  magic,  are 
too  well  known  to  need  more  than  the  merest  mention.  These 
l}Tics  continued  to  be  gathered  into  Miscellanies  like  the  early 
Tottel's,  and  nearly  a  dozen  such  Elizabethan  collections 
are  known  to  survive,  the  most  famous  of  which,  England's 
Helicon,  was  published  in  the  last  year  of  the  sixteenth  cent- 
ury. These  facts  enable  us  to  understand  why  the  England 
of  that  day  has  been  called  a  nest  of  singing  birds.  From  the 
latter  part  of  the  period,  too,  we  may  remember,  came  Chapman's 
swinging  translation  of  Homer  (1598-1615),  so  celebrated  by 
Keats,  in  his  sonnet  On  First  Looking  into  Chapman's  Homer 
and  Drayton's  fine  old  Ballad  of  Agincourt  (c.  1605),  which 
set  the  tune  for  Longfellow's  Skeleton  in  Armor  and  Tennyson's 
Charge  of  the  Light  Brigade: 

"  Fair  stood  the  wind  for  France, 
When  we  our  sails  advance, 
Nor  now  to  prove  our  chance 

Longer  will  tarry; 
But  putting  to  the  main, 
At  Caux,  the  mouth  of  Seine, 
With  all  his  martial  train, 

Landed  King  Harry." 

But  there  was  something  greater  than  all  this  song. 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE   ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA 

HABLOWE        SHAKESPEARE       JONSON        BEAUMONT  AND  FLETCHER       WEBSTER 

It  would  be  foolish  to  deny,  as  some  have  done,  that  the 
perfected  Elizabethan  drama,  which  remains  to  this  day  the 
greatest  achievement  in  the  literary  history  of  the  English  race, 
was  in  certain  of  its  features  a  development  from  the  crude,  long 
current  Miracle  Plays  and  Moralities.  At  the  same  time  no 
critical  effort  can  hope  to  make  plain  the  sudden  and  amazing 
transformation,  without  taking  into  account  the  inexplicable 
capacity  of  genius  for  striking  out  by  itself  and  doing  things 
that  have  never  been  done  before.  Law  there  doubtless  was, 
but  no  law  yet  known  to  science  will  disclose  just  how  this 
drama,  with  its  s])lendor  of  form  and  color,  its  palpitating 
life  and  soaring  spirit,  sprang  from  the  bloodless  body  of  death 
which  the  Moralities  indisputably  were.  Criticism  can  but 
record  a  few  facts,  and  leave  the  rest  to  speculation. 

Here  and  there,  even  in  the  old  IVIiracle  Plays,  a  writer 
would  venture  away  from  the  strict  Biblical  narrative  and  inter- 
polate little  scenes  of  humor  to  keep  alive  the  interest. 

„       " '     When  such  a  scene  grew  into  an  independent  play, 
or  rarre.t.      ^  '^  r  r    j ' 

it  came  to  be  known  as  an  Interlude,  the  nature  of 
which  we  should  understand  better  if  we  called  it  by  the  name  of 
farce.  John  Heywood,  who  was  a  friend  of  Sir  Thomas  More, 
II  nd  a  sort  of  master  of  revels  at  the  court  of  Henry  VIII.  and  of 
(^ueen  Mary,  conspicuously  developed  this  form.  His  Four 
PP,  for  instance,  written  in  Henry's  reign,  is  a  play  in  which  a 
Palmer,  a  Pardoner,  a  Potycary,  and  a  Pedler  compete  with 
eiicii  other  in  the  amusing,  if  not  very  edifying  jiastime  of  telling 
great  lies.  A  certain  famous  and  much  more  fully  developed 
farce  was  Gammer  Gurton's  Needle,  written  possibly  by  one 

08 


INTERLUDES  99 

William  Stevenson,  and  acted  at  Christ's  College,  Cambridge, 
about  the  time  of  Queen  Elizabeth's  accession.  In  its  five 
acts  of  prolonged  pother  about  an  old  dame's  lost  needle  there 
is  something  of  a  plot  and  of  character-play,  but  the  charac- 
ters are  drawn  from  the  lowest  life  and  the  language  is  intoler- 
ably coarse.  Like  Heywood's  Interludes,  it  is  written  in  a  kind 
of  doggerel  verse,  the  lines  in  this  case  being  long  and  the  accents 
rather  strongly  marked. 

Meanwhile  the  earliest  play  to  get  beyond  the  simplicity  of 
the  first  Interludes  and  also  keep  above  the  farcical  level,  the 
"Ralph  earliest  English  play,  in  short,  worthy  to  be  called  a 
Roister  drama,  though  as  yet  that  name  was  scarcely  em- 

Doister,"  ployed,  was  the  Ralph  Roister  Doister  of  Nicholas 
c.  1550.  udall  (1506-1556),  headmaster  of  Eton.  It  was 
probably  written  before  1550,  more  than  thirteen  years  before 
the  birth  of  Marlowe  and  Shakespeare.  It  is  a  love  come- 
dy, turning  on  the  sport  of  deluding  a  conceited  and  simple- 
witted  fellow  into  paying  court  to  a  woman  who  does  not  care 
for  him.  By  the  side  of  this,  with  a  date  that  brings  us  nearer 
to  the  birth  of  Shakespeare,  we  may  set  the  earliest  English 

tragedy — Gorboduc,   partly  the   work   of  Sackville. 

""  ^~  f  ^    It  is  a  tragedy  steeped  in  blood,  though  the  bloody 

jgg'j  deeds  are  only  reported  by  messengers,  not  enacted. 

Both  these  plays,  and  also  Gammer  Gurton's  Needle, 
plainly  betray  the  importation  of  a  new  method,  the  method  of 
the  ancient  Greek  and  Latin  drama.  In  the  first  place,  they 
are  organized  into  acts  and  scenes;  and  in  the  second  place, 
they  adhere  for  the  most  part  to  the  three  classical  laws  of  unity 
— the  unity  of  time,  which  required  that  the  action  represented 
should  not  extend  over  more  than  one  day,  the  unity  of  place, 
which  allowed  no  shifting  of  scene,  and  the  much  more  reasonable 
unity  of  action,  which  required  that  each  play  should  have,  and 
keep  closely  to,  one  central  theme.  Now  if  we  add  to  these 
elements  those  already  noted  as  coming  through  the  native  In- 
terlude— namely,  the  greater  elaboration  of  plot,  the  purpose 


100  TItE    EIJZAIiETIIAN   DRAMA 

of  amusing  rather  than  instructing,  and  above  all  the  substitu- 
tion of  real  personages  for  abstractions — we  see  just  what  the 
difference  between  these  and  the  earlier  plays  is  that  enables  us 
to  call  the  later  group  comedies  and  tragedies. 

Dramas  there  were,  then,  at  the  very  beginning  of  Elizabeth's 
reign,  but  not  yet  the  Elizabethan  drama.  Much  was  yet  to  be 
done.  The  slavish  following  of  classical  models  could  not  lead 
to  life.  The  dead-weight  unities  of  time  and  place  had  to  be  cast 
off,  and  even  the  unity  of  action  more  liberally  interpreted.  A 
poetic  style  at  once  flexible  and  noble  had  to  be  developed  or  in- 
vented. A  higher  conception  of  both  comedy  and  tragedy  as 
ever-present  elements  in  the  lives  of  men  was  still  to  be  attained. 
Through  thirty  years  of  Elizabeth's  reign  the  drama  continued  in 
this  experimental  stage,  while  with  the  increasing  love  for  pag- 
eants, mimes,  and  merrymakings,  theatre-going  became  a  fashion, 
strolling  players  roamed  over  England,  theatrical  companies 
were  formed,  and  theatres  licensed  and  built.  Then,  with 
Lyly,  Peele,  Greene,  Lodge,  Marlowe,  and  Shakespeare,  the 
drama  suddenly  came.  Suddenly;  for  through  all  the  thirty 
years  of  experiment,  scarcely  any  forward  movement  is  dis- 
cernible. The  poetical  drama  simply  arrived.  We  have  seen 
how,  by  grafting  classical  drama  upon  the  Interlude,  it  is  possi- 
ble to  make  out  a  derivation  from  the  Miracle  Plays  and  Morali- 
ties for  Ralph  Roister  Bolster  and  Gorboduc  and  Gammer  Giir- 
tons  Needle.  But  to  derive  from  the  dreary  inanity  of  Gorboduc 
the  power  and  splendor  even  of  Marlowe's  youthful  Tambur- 
laine  the  Great  is  something  that  may  not  be  attempted. 

Of  the  representatives  of  this  drama  who  antedated  Shake- 
speare, only  Christopher  Marlowe  may  be  specially  treated  here, 
though  Lyly's  prose  will  come  in  for  further  mention. 
^   nsopier  -^i^yif^y^Q    ^]^q  go,^  of  j^  shoemaker,  was  born  two 

jj(j^-!503     months   earlier  than   Shakespeare,   at   Canterbury. 
He  took  a  degree  at  Cambridge  in  1583.     Concern- 
ing the  few  years  of  his  mature  life  nothing  is  certainly  known. 
He  was  not  yet  thirty  years  old  when  he  died,  by  another  man's 


MARLOWE  "  101 

dagger,  in  a  brawl  at  a  village  near  London.  He  composed  five 
complete  tragedies,  Tamlmrlaine  the  Great  (in  two  Parts,  the 
First  Part  acted  about  1587  and  printed  in  1590),  Dr.  Faustus, 
The  Jew  of  Malta,  and  Edward  the  Second,  besides  two  extremely 
beautiful  sestiads  of  a  paraphrase  of  the  ancient  Greek  poem  of 
Hero  aiid  Leander. 

The  first  thing  to  impress  the  reader  of  iSIarlowe's  tragedies 
is  the  fiery  soul  of  Marlowe  himself,  which  is  thinly  disguised 
beneath  his  heroes.  In  imagination,  at  least,  he  seemed  to 
have  summed  up  the  energies  and  ambitions  of  his  age,  the 
fierce  desire  to  know  and  do  all  things.  He  would  even  have 
called  magic,  in  which  he  had  perhaps  some  faith,  to  his  aid, 
that  not  England  alone,  but  the  remote  and  ancient  kingdoms 
of  the  world,  Greece,  Egypt,  Asia,  might  revive  their  glories 
and  re-enact  their  triumphs  to  minister  to  this  craving  for  uni- 
versal experience.  His  heroes  are  types  of  greed — Tamburlaine 
of  greed  for  empire,  Faustus  of  greed  for  knowledge  and  power, 
the  Jew  of  jNIalta  of  greed  for  gold.  Faustus  willingly  sells 
his  soul  to  Lucifer  that  he  may  have  the  power  of  conjuring 
back  for  his  pastime  or  service  such  beings  as  Alexander, 

"Chief  spectacle  of  the  world's  pre-eminence," 
or  Helen,  of  the  fair 

"face  that  launched  a  thousand  shijos 
And  burnt  the  topless  towers  of  Ilium." 

A  secondary  thing  perhaps  in  the  estimate  of  Marlowe's 
genius,  but  one  of  incalculable  value  for  the  future  development 
of  English  poetry,  was  the  part  he  played  in  shaping  our  heroic 
blank  verse.  As  to  Surrey  belongs  the  credit  of  finding  this 
form,  and  to  Shakespeare  the  credit  of  perfecting  it,  so  to  Marlowe 
belongs  the  intermediate  credit  of  first  revealing  its  poetic  capa- 
bilities. This  he  did  by  ceasing  to  count  off  mechanically  the 
ten  syllables  of  the  line,  using  them  instead  only  as  a  base; 
by  heeding  rather  the  longer  rhythm,  allowing  extra  syllables 
to  creep   in  or  drop  out,  and  lines  to  link  with  lines  or  break 


102  THE    ELIZABETHAN   DRAMA 

off  short  in  the  middle;  in  short,  by  allowing  his  feeling  so  to 
inform  the  rh}1;hm  that  it  rises  and  falls,  is  accelerated  or 
retarded,  in  accordance  with  the  spirit  that  breathes  through 
it.  Here  is  the  kind  of  blank  verse  that  was  employed  in  the 
tragedy  of  Garboduc: 

"I  fear  the  fatal  time  now  draweth  on 
When  civil  hate  shall  end  the  noble  line 
Of  famous  Brute  and  of  his  royal  seed ; 
Great  Jove,  defend  the  mischiefs  now  at  hand." 

The  difference  between  this  and  the  freedom  of  Marlowe's 
lines,  their  lift  and  rush  and  majestic  sweep,  must  be  at  once 
apparent : 

"  Now  get  thee  to  thy  lords, 
And  tell  them  I  will  come  to  chastise  them 
For  murdering  Gaveston;  hie  thee,  get  thee  gone! 
Edward  with  fire  and  sword  follows  at  thy  heels." 

(Edward  the  Second.) 

"The  stars  move  still,  time  runs,  the  clock  will  strike, 
The  Devil  will  come,  and  Faustus  must  be  damned. 
O,  I'll  leap  up  to  my  God!     Who  pulls  me  down? 
See,  see  where  Christ's  blood  streams  in  the  firmament! 
One  drop  would  save  my  soul!" 

"Oh,  thou  art  fairer  than  the  evening  air 
Clad  in  the  beauty  of  a  thousand  stars." 

(.Doctor  Faustus.) 

In  sum,  then,  this  is  what  Marlowe  did.  He  constructed 
plays  full-bodied  like  the  classical  tragedies,  but  with  a  freedom 
that  was  anything  but  classical.  This  freedom  resulted  partly 
from  the  popular  character  of  the  English  drama,  created 
as  it  was  chiefly  by  the  actors  themselves  for  mixed  audi- 
ences, and  partly  from  the  genius  of  Marlowe,  which  refused  to 
be  bound  by  rules.  He  omitted,  except  in  one  instance,  the 
chorus;  he  subordinated  the  messengers  and  allowed  violent 
action  on  the  stage;  he  paid  no  heed  to  the  unities  of  time  and 
place,  which  of  course  the  imagination  can  dispense  with;  he 
bent  the  metre  to  his  will  in  his  "mighty  line";  he  breathed  the 


MARLOWE  103 

energies  of  his  own  spirit  into  his  characters.  What  he  failed 
to  do,  however,  was  to  give  sustained  and  compHcated  action, 
to  reHeve  his  high-wrought  tragedy  with  humor,  to  keep  his 
declamation  free  from  bombast,  and  to  impart  to  his  characters 
those  subtler  touches  of  complex  human  nature  w^hich  would 
make  them  less  like  creatures  possessed  by  a  single  passion 
and  more  like  the  men  and  women  whose  daily  lives  we  share. 
It  is  true  he  approached  nearer  to  this  ideal  in  his  last  play, 
but  with  some  loss  of  opportunity  for  those  bursts  of  impetuous 
poetry  which  make  his  romantic  tragedies  so  fascinating.  Con- 
sidered merely  as  plays,  therefore,  Mr.  Saintsbury  makes  bold 
to  say  that  his  dramas  "are  after  all  only  the  most  magnificent 
of  failures."  That  is  another  way  of  saying  that  with  all  their 
greatness  they  fall  immeasurably  short  of  the  ideal  which 
Shakespeare  has  shown  us  could  be  reached.  Mere  then  for  a 
second  time  we  come  to  a  gap  that  historical  criticism  is 
helpless  to  bridge. 

Meanwhile  it  will  not  be  unprofitable  to  glance  at  some  of 

the  conditions  that  prevailed  about  the  time  of  Marlowe's  death 

and  Shakespeare's  advent,  or  in  the  last  decade  of 

Status  of       ^jjg  century.     Public  interest  in  theatrical  produc- 

the  Drama      .  ,  .  ■         c 

h    t  /5w    ^^^^^  was  constantly  growmg.      iwo  companies  of 

players  with  a  royal  license,  and  a  number  of  minor 
troops,  were  playing  in  the  immediate  suburbs  of  London. 
Theatres  multiplied.  "The  Theatre,"  as  it  was  called,  and 
"The  Curtain,"  were  already  in  existence.  "Blackfriars"  was 
built  in  1596,  and  "The  Globe,"  a  summer  theatre,  made 
especially  famous  by  Shakespeare  and  his  associates,  in  1599. 
The  summer  theatres  were  for  daylight  performances  in  the 
open  air,  with  a  roof,  it  might  be,  over  the  stage,  or  over  the 
boxes  and  galleries  which  ringed  the  pit.  Spectators  were 
allowed  to  sit  on  the  stage  and  mingle  with  the  actors.  In 
the  presentation  of  the  play,  the  female  characters  were  im- 
personated by  boys.  The  scenery  was  of  the  rudest,  or  quite 
wanting,   a  change  of  scene  being  indicated  by  a  displayed 


This  sketch  of  the  interior  of  the  Swan  Theatre  was  discovered  a  few  years 
ago  in  the  University  Library  at  Utrecht.  It  was  made  by  Johauues  de  Witt,  a 
Dutch  scholar  who  visited  London  about  the  year  1596.  The  theatre  stood  in 
Bankside,  on  the  south  shore  of  the  Thames,  where  The  Globe  also  was  built, 
for  playhouses  were  not  allowed  within  the  corporate  limits  of  the  city.  It  was 
a  high  structure,  circular  or  octagonal  In  shape,  and  was  doubtless  a  theatre  of 
the  best  contemporary  type.  In  the  central  pit,  or  arena  (planities,  arena),  the 
spectators  who  paid  the  lowest  price  of  admission,  the  "groundlings,"  were 
compelled  to  stand;  seats  {sedilia)  were  provided  for  others;  suoh  as  cho.se  to 
pay  for  the  privilege  might  sit  on  the  stage.  The  orchestra  occupied  a  balcony 
at  one  side  of  the  stage.  The  rude,  bare  stage  itself  {proscamum)  rose  from 
the  pit  on  supports.  Only  the  rear  portion,  which  was  immediately  in  front 
of  the  actors'  gallery  and  tiring-room  (mirnorum  cedes),  and  which  could  be 
screened  off  at  need  by  a  curtain,  was  covered.  A  roof  (tectuju)  covered  also 
the  gallery  (porticus)  and  the  balconies  below  it.  Prom  a  lodge  at  the  top  a 
trumpeter  announced  with  a  flourish  the  beginnitig  of  the  play.  A  flag  floated 
from  the  summit  whenever  a  play  was  on  the  boards,  the  flag  of  this  particular 
theatre  bearing  the  figure  of  a  swan. 

104 


SHAKESPEARE  105 

placard.  The  effect  of  this  was  to  concentrate  attention  upon 
the  lines  and  the  acting,  a  circumstance  that  cannot  be  too 
much  emphasized,  since  it  gives  at  least  one  very  good  reason 
why  the  drama  then  rose  to  a  height  never  since  attained.  At 
the  same  time,  where  the  public  performance  was  the  sole 
end,  a  practical  acquaintance  with  the  conditions  and  limitations 
of  stage-acting  was  essential  to  the  production  of  a  good  play, 
and  university  men,  like  those  who  have  been  mentioned  above 
as  preceding  Shakespeare,  speedily  found  themselves  equalled  as 
playwrights  by  the  actors  themselves.  A  high  development  of 
the  drama  would  seem  to  have  been  inevitable,  and  only  the 
fortuitous  coming  into  these  conditions  of  an  extraordinary- 
genius  was  needed  to  insure  the  highest  development.  To  the 
glory  of  Elizabethan  England  and  the  delight  of  future  genera- 
tions, that  genius  came. 

The  word  genius,  however,  must  not  in  this  connection 
be  associated  with  anything  of  the  monstrous  or  superhuman. 
William  From  all  that  v;e  can  learn  or  dare  imagine. 
Shake-  William  Shakespeare  was  not  a  man  whom  one  would 

speare,  have  picked  out  of  a  crowd,  but  rather  such  a  man 

lo6^-16l6  ^^  ^j^g  might  have  gone  to  in  a  crowd  because  he 
bore  so  little  the  marks  of  greatness  and  seemed  so  approach- 
ably  human.  Such  a  man  leaves  behind  him  slight  record 
beyond  the  kindly  remembrances  of  his  familiars.  Besides,  few 
at  that  time,  outside  of  the  profession,  were  so  bold  as  to  dream 
that  a  play-actor,  acting  and  writing  plays  for  an  hour's  amuse- 
ment, would  be  of  much  concern  to  the  centuries.  His  genius 
might  be  amply  recognized,  but  what  lesson  could  be  drawn 
from  his  biography  ?  So  it  comes  about  that  we  can  count  on  our 
fingers  the  known  facts  of  Shakespeare's  life.  He  was  born  of 
middle-class  parents  at  Stratford-on-Avon,  and  baptized  there  on 
the  26th  of  April,  1564.  At  the  age  of  eighteen  he  married  a 
yeoman's  daughter,  Anne  Hathaway,  a  woman  considerably  older 
than  himself.  About  1586  he  went  up  to  London,  possibly 
because  he  had  been  convicted  of  stealing  deer  in  Sir  Thomas 


106  THE  ELIZABETHAN   DRAMA 

Lucy's  park.  He  became  connected  with  the  theatres,  first,  tra- 
(Htion  says,  by  holding  horses  at  the  doors,  and  fell  in  with  the 
group  of  Marlowe  and  Greene.  For  ten  years  he  was  an  actor 
and  wrote  poems  and  plays.  For  some  ten  years  more  he  was 
a  shareholder  in  the  theatres  as  well  as  an  actor  and  playwright. 
Yet  another  ten  years  he  spent  mainly  in  retirement  at  Strat- 
ford, writing  still  a  few  plays;  and  he  died  there  on  the  23d  of 
April,  1616,  just  fifty-two  years  old. 

Really,  even  this  outline  of  unheroic  facts  is  quite  super- 
fluous. Notwithstanding  all  the  labor  that  is  spent  on  his  biog- 
raphy, the  important  thing  is  not  yvhat  particular  part  of  the 
world  of  men  and  events  Shakespeare  came  into  contact  with;  the 
important  and  obvious  thing  is  that  he  absorbed  the  whole 
world  into  himself,  as  perfectly  as  does  the  mirror  which  becomes 
indistinguishable  from  the  landscape  it  reflects.  We  may 
please  ourselves  with  fancying  that  the  song  of  the  lark  that 
"at  heaven's  gate  sings"  or  the  vision  of  the  dying  Falstaff 
who  "babbled  of  green  fields,"  were  born  of  the  rural  scenes 
that  surrounded  the  poet  in  his  youth  and  in  his  later  manhood ; 
but  the  howling  of  the  tempest  about  Prospero's  magic  isle,  and 
the  vent  of  blood  upon  dead  Cleopatra's  bosom,  are  equally  truth- 
ful and  moving,  and  what  experience  were  they  born  of  ?  Shake- 
speare's contact  with  life  was  unquestionably  first-hand  as  far  as 
his  opportunities  allowed,  and  he  brought  to  that  contact  the 
rarest  power  of  observation  and  insight  that  has  ever  put  itself 
upon  record,  but  above  all  this  he  had  the  imagination  to  con- 
struct out  of  the  certainly  limited  materials  of  his  own  experience 
the  most  varied  and  complex  characters  and  situations  that  life 
affords.  It  is,  therefore,  practically  impossible  for  us  to  know 
where  his  experience  left  off  and  his  imagination  began,  nor  is  it 
easy  to  conceive  any  important  purpose  which  such  knowledge 
could  serve. 

A  small  portion  of  his  work  is  non-dramatic,  and  was 
produced  early.  His  first  printed  volume  was  the  versified 
storj'  of  Venus  and  Adonis,  159.3;  Lurrece  followed    in    1594. 


SHAKESPEARE  107 

They  are  amatory  poems  of  a  type  then  in  vogue,  scarcely 
so  good  on  the  whole  as  Marlowe's  Hero  and  Leander,  though 

superior  in  some  very  important  respects.  His  un- 
,  „  qualifiedly  great  poems  are  the  Sonnets,  which  may 

have  been  mostly  composed  about  the  same  period, 
though  they  were  not  published  until  1609.  They  are  sonnets 
of  fourteen  lines,  arranged,  not  in  the  Petrarchian  form  of 
octave  and  sestet,  but  in  three  quatrains  with  a  closing  couplet. 
By  this  arrangement,  the  application,  antithesis,  climax,  or 
whatever  it  may  be,  is  concentrated  in  the  last  two  lines,  gaining  a 
peculiar  force  that  is  usually  missing  in  the  other  form.  The 
occasion  of  the  sonnets,  and  the  identity  of  the  persons — a  man 
and  a  woman — addressed  in  them,  have  given  rise  to  endless 
and  mostly  profitless  discussion.  It  seems  quite  enough  to 
know  them  for  what  they  are,  love  poems,  namely,  of  the 
most  intense  kind,  with  an  intensity  curbed  always  by  calm 
reason,  leaving  them  at  the  highest  level  of  poetic  expression 
without  overflow  and  charging  them  with  all  the  fullness  of 
thought  that  lines  still  lyric  may  be  made  to  bear. 

"When,  in  disgrace  with  fortune  and  men's  eyes, 
I  all  alone  beweep  my  outcast  state 
And  trouble  deaf  heaven  with  my  bootless  cries 
And  look  upon  myself  and  curse  my  fate, 
Wishing  me  like  to  one  more  rich  in  hope, 
Featured  like  him,  like  him  with  friends  possess'd. 
Desiring  this  man's  art  and  that  man's  scope, 
With  what  I  most  enjoy  contented  least; 
Yet  in  these  thoughts  myself  ahnost  despising, 
Haply  I  think  on  thee,  and  then  my  state, 
liike  to  the  lark  at  break  of  day  arising 
From  sullen  earth,  sings  hymns  at  heaven's  gate; 
For  thy  sweet  love  remember' d  such  wealth  brings 
That  then  I  scorn  to  change  my  state  with  kings." 

Perhaps  nowhere  else  in  all  poetry  is  selection  so  hard  a 
task.     Smooth  and  tranquil  lines, 

"When  to  the  sessions  of  sweet  silent  thought" — 


108  THE   ELIZABETHAN   DRAMA 

soaring   lines, 

"Xot  marble  nor  the  gilded  monuments" — 
imaginative    lines, 

"Bare  ruined  clunns,  whore  late  the  sweet  birds  su.ng" — 

lines   of  profoundest  truth, 

"Love  is  not  love 
Which  alters  when  it  alteration  finds" — 

crowd  into  the  memory  with  almost  importunate  insistence. 
No  other  sonnets  have  approached  them  in  manifoldness 
of  excellence.  The  sonnets  of  Milton  and  Wordsworth  are  so 
different  in  theme,  those  of  Mrs.  Browning  and  Rossetti  so 
different  in  manner  and  expression,  that  comparison  is  impossible 
and  nothing  but  the  identity  of  name  could  suggest  it.  As  for 
other  sonnets  of  the  Elizabethan  age,  some  doubtless  equal 
them  in  sweetness,  or  statcliness,  or  sincerity,  but  none  dis- 
close such  an  array  of  \arious  and  harmonized  virtues  as  sets 
this    series    apart    and   supreme. 

The  precise  chronology  of  Shakespeare's  plays  will  never  be 
determined.  Elizabethan  plays  were  written  for  acting,  not  for 
His  j)ublication,  and  tliere  were  good  reasons  why  the 

Dramas.  companies  should  keep  their  plays  in  manuscript. 
Shakespeare's  thirty-six  dramas  (Pericles  is  now  included  as  a 
thirty-seventh)  were  not  published  in  a  body  until  the  famous 
"first  folio"  of  1623,  nine  years  after  his  death,  and  more  than 
half  of  them  were  then  published  for  the  first  time.  Separate 
plays  had  been  printed  earlier  in  cheap  quarto  form,  two  or  three 
in  1597.  The  date  of  the  earliest  discoverec|  allusion  to  any 
play  is  1594.  It  is  possible  to  distinguish  broadly  four  groups: 
first,  early  plays,  notably  Midsu7nmer  Night's  Dream  and 
Romeo  and  Juliet,  with  several  of  the  English  chronicle  plays, 
including  Richard  III.;  second,  plays  written  after  the  age  of 
thirty,  towards  the  end  of  the  century,  chiefly  romantic  comedies 
like  the  Merchant  of  Venice,  As  You  Like  It,  and  TwelfthNight; 


SHAKESPEARE  •  109 

third,  plays  of  marked  maturity,  belonging  to  the  early  sixteen- 
hundreds,  the  tragedies  of  Julius  Coesar,  Hamlet,  Othello, 
Macbeth,  Lear,  Antony  and  Cleopatra,  etc.;  fourth,  late  plays 
of  a  strangely  serene  temper,  free  fancy,  and  magic  touch, 
especially  Cymheline,  Winter's  Tale,  and  The  Tempest.  Of 
course  they  vary  in  excellence  as  they  vary  in  theme  and  in 
the  maturity  of  the  art  that  created  them.  Those  named 
above,  with  three  or  four  others  which  readers  may  supply  for 
themselves  at  will,  are  among  the  best.  To  distinguish  more 
particularly  is  difficult,  where  all  plead  their  individual  perfec- 
tions, and  where  great  diversity  of  kind  fairly  precludes  com- 
parison. But  as  tragedy  is  on  a  higher  plane  than  comedy,  and 
as  a  poet's  dreams  may  outstrip  an  actual  king's  or  warrior's 
deeds,  opinion  has  tended  to  set  above  the  rest  the  four  great 
romantic  tragedies  that  chance  to  bear  the  briefest  names — 
Hamlet,  Othello,  Macbeth,  and  King  Lear. 

In  such  a  vast  body  of  work,  of  so  varied  and  complex  a  char- 
acter, produced  under  such  obscure  conditions,  it  is  evident  that 
scholarship  must  find  no  end  of  problems.   The  schol- 
arship, however,  that  deals  with  these  problems  is  of 
shiv  ^  peculiarly  human  kind.    Shakespeare  himself,  with 

his  common  school  education,  his  "small  Latin 
and  less  Greek,"  was  no  scholar  as  his  age  would  have  defined 
the  term,  and  his  work  is  at  the  farthest  remove  from  the  kind 
of  erudition  that  engages  the  zeal  of  the  dry-as-dust  student. 
Some  problems  there  are  for  purely  documentary  investigation. 
The  life  of  the  man  is  one.  The  sources  of  the  plays  is  another 
— for  Shakespeare  was  a  perfectly  free-handed  borrower  of  plots 
and  situations.*  The  detection  even  of  parallels,  the  tracing 
of  thoughts  and  expressions  to  earlier  or  contemporary  writers, 
though  little  profitable  in  his  case,  may  be  carried  on  in  tlie 

♦The  Hamlet  legend,  for  instance,  may  be  found  in  the  works  of  the  old 
Danish  historian,  Suxo  Gramraatieus;  the  chief  .source  of  Macbeth  and  other 
histoi'ical  di'amas  was  Holinshed's  Clironiclfs;  the  main  incident  of  The  Mer- 
chant of  Venice  is  from  an  Italian  collection  of  stories,  11  Pecorone,  while  the 
casket  story  is  from  the  Gesta  Momanorum;  etc. 


110  *   THE  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA 

same  spirit  of  historical  inquiry.*  But  beyond  these  are 
problems  which  demand  a  different  kind  of  study.  Where  the 
texts  vary,  or  where  the  readings  are  manifestly  "corrupt," 
that  is,  imperfect  or  wrong,  it  becomes  a  nice  question  what 
Shakespeare  actually  wrote,  and  the  force  of  a  passage  or  even 
the  understanding  of  some  entire  scene  or  character  may  turn  on 
such  a  question.  Shall  we,  for  instance,  in  Macbeth  I.  vii.  6, 
read  with  the  Folio,  "  upon  this  banke  (i.e.,  bench)  and  schoole 
of  time,"  or  accept  the  common  emendation,  "upon  this  bank 
and  shoal  of  time?"  Since  investigation  of  the  spelling  only 
proves  that  either  is  possible,  the  last  appeal  is  to  poetic  judg- 
ment. Again,  since  we  know  that  it  was  customary  to  retouch 
or  adapt  plays,  or  for  several  writers  to  collaborate  in  producing 
one,  there  arises  the  problem  of  determining  what  parts  of  some 
of  these  dramas  may  have  been  written  by  other  hands,  or  what 
part  Shakespeare  may  have  had  in  the  production  of  other  dramas 
sometimes  doubtfully  attributed  to  him.  Still  more  difficult, 
perhaps,  is  the  attempt  to  judge  from  internal  evidence  how 
early  or  late  in  life  any  particular  play  was  written.  An  intimate 
acquaintance  not  only  with  all  the  traits  of  Shakespeare's  genius 
but  with  life  itself,  and  a  psychological  insight  and  poetic  appre- 
ciation akin  to  divination,  are  needed  for  work  of  this  kind.  It 
is  human  scholarship  in  the  highest  sense. 

The  poet's  vocabulary  offers  a  study  of  more  immediate 

importance.     To  casual  observation  it  may  seem  almost  wholly 

modern.     It  might  have  sounded  a  little  queer  as 

,  Shakespeare  would  have  pronounced  it,  with  broad 

Language.  ^  * 

a's  and  lip-rounded  short  n  s,  but  the  words  are  our 

familiar  words,   with  only  here  and  there  an  obsolete  term. 

*One  example  may  be  given.  The  folloi^ing  lines  ai'e  from  Sidney's 
Astrophel  and  Stella,  Sonnet  39,  and  may  be  studied  in  connection  with  Macbeth 
II.  ii.  36-40,  for  whatever  the  study  is  worth: 

"  Come,  Sleep!    O  Sleep,  the  certain  knot  of  peace, 
The  baiting-place  of  wit,  the  balm  of  woe, 
The  poor  man's  wealth,  the  prisoner's  I'elease, 
Th'  indifferent  judge  between  the  high  and  low." 

Montaigne  has  lately  been  examined  as  a  Shakespearean  ' '  source  "  iu  this  sense. 


SHAKESPEARE  111 

It  is,  indeed,  by  the  side  of  Spenser's  archaic  diction,  de- 
cidedly modern,  and  one  seldom  requires  a  glossary  to 
read  it.  At  the  same  time,  if  we  would  get  always  the 
exact  meaning,  and  thereby  increase  our  enjoyment,  we  need 
to  bear  in  mind  the  fact  that  three  hundred  years  have  worked 
some  inevitable  changes  in  our  language.  Not  only  words,  but 
meanings  of  words,  have  been  lost,  and  new  ones  gained.  An 
obsolete  word  will  give  us  little  trouble.  But  an  old  or  unfa- 
miliar meaning  of  a  word  still  in  use  may  quite  escape  us  unless 
we  are  on  our  guard.  When  we  discover  that  in  Shakespeare  not 
only  appetites  may  be  "eager,"  but  also  the  food  that  satisfies 
them  (Sonnet  cxviii),  and  that  acid  which  sours  milk  is  thought 
of  as  "eager  droppings,"  we  see  that  we  must  get  back  to  an 
earlier,  more  concrete,  meaning  of  the  word;  and. then  we  are 
better  prepared  to  understand  just  what  was  in  his  mind  when 
he  wrote  of  an  "eager  foe,"  an  "eager  cry,"  "the  bitter  clamor 
of  two  eager  tongues,"  "  It  is  a  nipping  and  an  eager  air."  Or 
if  we  but  press  the  literal  meanings  of  the  words,  the  "extrava- 
gant and  erring  spirit"  which  appears  to  Hamlet  in  such  a 
"questionable  shape"  becomes  a  simple  ghost  that  stalks  abroad 
with  affable  mien.  Three  or  four  such  examples  suffice  to  prove 
the  point.  When  a  poet  writes,  as  Shakespeare  did,  with  such 
absolute  sureness  of  thought  and  pregnancy  of  meaning,  we  can 
ill  afford  to  miss  anv'\vhere  his  slightest  intent. 

Passing  now  to  the  substance  of  the  dramas,  we  note  first 
the  background  against  which  the  main  characters  and  action 

are  projected.  Comparatively,  the  background  is 
Background,  of  slight  importance,  since  humanity  reveals  itself  as 

much  the  same  in  all  times  and  places.  But  the 
thing  in  itself  is  not  slight,  and  it  helps  to  mark  the  gulf  that  sepa- 
rates the  Shakespearean  drama  from  what  had  preceded  it.  One 
can  imagine  the  astonishment  with  which  a  Greek  or  a  French 
dramatist  would  have  looked  at  one  of  these  plays.  Instead  of 
merely  listening  to  the  successive  declamations  of  a  few  chai'- 
acters,  he  would  have  found  his  ears  and  eves  assailed  with  all 


112  THE    ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA 

the  noise  and  bustle  of  life.  The  scene  shifts  rapidly  from  sea 
to  land,  from  street  to  palace,  from  senate  chamber  to  tent  and 
battlefield.  Drums  beat,  soldiers  cross  and  recross  the  stage 
with  flourish  of  trumpets  and  music  of  hautboys,  carriers  with 
lanterns  shout  for  ostlers  in  a  tavern  yard,  royalty  goes  to  its 
coronation  at  Westminster,  there  are  gaming  and  drinking,  pro- 
cessions of  priests  und  courtiers,  throngs  of  Grecian  revellers, 
Roman  mobs,  English  thieves  and  justices,  a  wine-cellar,  a 
graveyard,  a  tiring-room,  a  moated  grange, — all  the  bewildering 
panorama  of  life  as  Shakespeare  knew  it  in  his  own  day  or 
dreamed  it  in  the  days  of  others.  Xo  bewilderment,  however, 
results.  Action  may  go  on  within  action,  the  characters  may 
turn  actors  themselves  and  a  play  start  up  behind  the  real  play, 
but  the  controlling  hand  of  the  poet  so  interweaves  these  things 
as  merely  to  enhance  the  sense  of  reality  while  leaving  the  central 
plot  unbroken. 

The  background  itself  is,  for  the  most  part,  feudal  or  renais- 
sance Europe.  Society,  for  instance,  is  not  democratic,  but 
aristocratic,  with  distinctions  sharply  drawn.  Instead  of 
modem  commercial  and  industrial  enterprises,  there  are 
family  feuds  and  national  wars.  Instead  of  science  in  its  lab- 
oratory, there  is  superstition  and  the  witches'  cauldron.  But 
these  are  the  accidents  of  time,  and  scarcely  in  any  way  affect 
the  universality  of  the  passions  that  play  their  part  among  them. 
Moreover,  the  element  of  external  nature  is  one  that  does  not 
change  with  time,  and  this  permanent  element  of  truthfulness 
and  beauty  is  not  lost  sight  of.  True,  to  a  dramatist  this  is  of 
little  concern,  and  Shakespeare's  glimpses  of  nature  may  seem 
slight  to  those  who  are  read  in  the  poetry  of  Wordsworth  and 
Tennyson,  but  they  are  seldom  wanting.  If  the  play  is  The 
Merchant  of  Venice,  there  is  the  star-sown  sky  of  an  Italian 
night;  if  Macbeth,  a  blasted  Scottish  heath;  if  The  Tempest,  the 
roaring  waves,  the  whistling  winds,  the  organ-toned  thunder. 
The  accuracy  and  sympathy,  too,  with  which  these  things  are 
portrayed,  are  in  accord  with  the  truth  that  marks  all  else. 


SHAKESPEARE  113 

AVhether  it  be  the  "reverberate  hills,"  the  "brown  furze,"  the 
"ribald  crows,"  the  "husks  wherein  the  acorn  cradled,"  or  the 

"  daffodils, 
That  come  before  the  swallow  dares,  and  take 
The  winds  of  March  with  beauty, ' ' 

the  observation  and  love  of  a  true  poet  of  nature  are  inevitably 

disclosed.  ' 

But  the  essence  of  drama  lies,  of  course,  in  the  passions  and 

actions   of  the   characters.     Were   Shakespeare's   dramas   less 

comprehensive  in  scope,  less  profound  in  analysis, 

Characters  .  .  .  .  .  J      ' 

J  ,  ^.       less  minute  in  detail,  less  faithful  to  things  as  thev 

and  Action.  ...  &  . 

are,  it  might  require  a  hundred  words  properly  to 
characterize  them.  As  it  is,  to  say  simply  that  they  enact  life, 
is  to  put  in  two  words  the  truest  statement  of  their  nature  and 
the  highest  tribute  to  their  virtue.  The  characters  are  all  men 
and  women,  who  are  never  made  to  act  in  any  particular  way, 
but  are  simply  seen  to  act,  by  the  direction  of  circumstances  and 
under  pressure  of  conflicting  wills,  in  a  perfect  accordance  with 
the  laws  of  their  own  being.  Never  before  Shakespeare's  time, 
except  to  a  limited  extent  in  comedy,  had  the  drama  set  before 
itself  this  difficult  ideal.  The  personages  of  Greek  tragedy  may 
be  very  real  men  anil  women  (less  often  women),  and  the  situ- 
ations may  even  draw  out  character,  but  character  is  seldom 
seen  to  create  a  situation  or  control  action;  all  that  is  in  the 
hands  of  an  arbitrary  and  unalterable  power.  The  Gods,  and 
the  Fate  behind  the  Gods,  are  the  movers,  and  men  and  women 
are  the  puppets  of  Destiny.  In  the  pre-Shakespearean  drama, 
from  the  ]Miracle  Plays  tlown,  the  word  character  is  almost 
a  misnomer.  The  character  may  be  drawn  from  history  or 
legend,  and  in  so  far  real,  but  it  is  absolutely  fixed,  as  station- 
ary in  its  composition  as  the  particles  of  a  monument.  At  the 
worst  it  is  not  even  real,  l)ut  a  bare  allegorical  abstraction  of  some 
one  quality  with  no  human  likeness  beyond  the  power  to  walk 
and  talk.  At  the  best,  as  in  Marlowe,  it  is  still  a  magnificent 
impersonation  of  a  single  passion  to  the  exclusion  of  the  count- 


114  THE  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA 

less  humors  and  motives  that  combine  to  make  real  character 
— is  a  type,  in  other  words,  and  not  an  individual. 

Now  there  are  types  in  Shakespeare  too.  Character  in  the 
real  world  leans  always  toward  the  exaggeration  of  some  qual- 
ity, the  tyranny  of  some  passion,  and  we  have  an  actual  man 
who  will  stand  in  that  particular  for  ten  thousand  men.  Tiu; 
play  of  life  would  not  otherwise  go  on;  and  the  possibility  of 
moral  instruction  would  vanish  with  the  need  for  it.  Yet  there 
are  seldom  two  types  of  the  same  virtue  or  vice  that  are  not 
in  their  minor  differences  widely  remote.  Just  here  is  the 
truthfulness  of  Shakespeare's  art.  His  t\-])es  have  always  the 
minor  distinctions;  they  are  individuals  still,  with  a  ruling  passion 
that  does  not  crowd  out  other  passions  and  obliterate  their  kin- 
ship w  ith  men.  Hence  it  is  that  his  characters  do  not  pass  readily 
into  dictionary  names,  Shylock  suggests  himself  as  a  possible 
exception;  but  even  when  Ave  are  prompted  to  call  a  man  a 
Shylock,  we  know  well  that,  however  grasping  or  implacably  re- 
vengeful he  may  be,  he  is  not  like  to  Shylock  all  in  all.  Upon  Shy- 
lock, as  upon  you  and  me,  the  laws  of  permutation  have  worked, 
and  he  keeps  his  individuality  without  hazard  of  duplication. 

Some  departure  from  reality  may  be  granted  in  the  dram- 
atist's tendency  to  accentuate  and  idealize.  His  grouping  of 
characters,  for  example,  is  often  arbitrary  and  ideal.  Such 
people  we  have  all  seen.  But  so  many  marked  and  contrasted 
individualities  in  the  same  group  it  would  be  hard  to  find.  It 
is  as  if  precisely  those  people  of  a  community  who  have  the  most 
interesting  personalities  and  the  greatest  capacity  for  reacting 
upon  their  surroundings,  were  brought  into  a  single  circle  and 
took  part  in  a  single  though  complicated  action.  Gather  such 
a  group  of  characters,  for  instance,  into  a  great  feudal  family  of 
lord  and  lady,  retainer,  page,  tiring-woman,  down  to  cellarer 
and  kitchen  .scullion,  and  imagine  the  interesting  .spectacle  which 
the  ordinary  life  of  that  family  would  present.  Then  let  there 
be  introduced  some  extraordinary  occurrence,  with  its  attendant 
commotion,  and  we  should  have  a  further  point  in  which  the 


SHAKESPEARE  1 1 5 

dramas  depart  from  the  more  familiar  aspects  of  real  life.  Their 
scenes  are  likewise  in  a  measure  ideal.  That  is  to  say,  they  are 
either  taken  from  the  great  crises  of  history,  or  they  are  invented 
outright.  But  all  this  is  only  the  exercise  of  the  poet's  privilege 
to  select  and  combine,  that  art  may  reveal  life  at  its  highest  pos- 
sibilities. The  processes  of  nature  and  of  human  history  are 
slow;  not  every  year  do  they  bring  on  the  stage  a  Mark  Antony 
and  a  battle  of  Actium,  a  Hamlet  and  his  murdered  father.  The 
poet  simply  adapts  history,  or  creates  it,  imaginatively,  for  the 
greater  force  of  his  revelations.  Essential  reality  remains.  The 
love  of  Romeo  and  Juliet,  the  ingratitude  of  Lear's  daugh- 
ters, gain  in  interest  and  tragic  pathos  from  the  splendor  or 
majesty  of  their  setting,  yet  lose  at  the  same  time  no  touch  or 
accent  of  human  truth.  Rank  and  station  may  give  a  strong 
bent  to  character  or  change  the  direction  and  object  of  its  ener- 
gies; they  cannot  for  a  moment  deflect  the  workings  of  any 
physical  or  moral  law, — mitigate  remorse  for  crime,  or  alleviate 
the  pangs  of  wounded  love.  Beneath  the  robes  of  state  or  the 
rags  of  beggary,  Shakespeare  never  fails  to  reveal  the  man. 

In  illustration  of  this  fundamental  thesis,  that  Shakespeare's 
dramas  enact  life,  and  that  his  characters  are  always  individuals, 
responding  like  individuals  to  their  environment,  growing,  and 
changing  beneath  the  shaping  power  of  circumstances  and  their 
own  deeds,  take  a  single  illustration.  When,  at  the  end  of  the 
tragedy  of  Macbeth,  disaster  is  overtaking  the  king  who  has  won 
his  throne  by  such  foul  means,  the  wailing  of  women  is  heard. 

Macbeth.  Wherefore  was  that  cry? 

Seyton.     The  queen,  my  lord,  is  dead. 

Macbeth.  She  should  have  died  hereafter. 

Death  was  certain,  anyway!  Yet  Macbeth  had  been  a  most 
affectionate  husband  to  this  woman  who  had  abetted  him  in  his 
terrible  deeds.  Crime  has  wrought  its  inevitable  consequences. 
The  woman  dies  of  remorse  and  madness,  and  the  husband, 
dead  to  every  motion  of  affection,  is  prompted  to  make  but 
this  unfeeling  comment  upon  the  fate  of  the  partner  of  his  love 


116  THE  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA 

and  guilt.  The  man  who  has  "  supp'd  full  with  horrors"  cannot 
be  touched  to  pity  by  that  which  once  would  have  been  the 
most  pitiful  thing  that  could  befall  him.  It  is  not  Shakespeare 
makes  it  so;  it  is  the  unalterable  law  which  a  moral  universe 
imposes  upon  its  living  creatures. 

In  this  wonderful  truth,  then,  to  human  life,  revealing 
an  ideal  world  that  in  every  minutest  line  and  light  and 
shadow  seems  the  faithful  counterpart  of  our  real  world,  lies 
the  supreme  gift  of  the  poet  whom  of  all  poets  we  like  best  to 
call  a  creator.  It  is  impossible  to  follow  here  the  gift  in  its  ampli- 
tude; to  give  any  conception  of  the  constantly  shifting  conditions 
under  which  he  sets  men  to  work  out  the  drama  of  their  destinies, 
nor  even  to  enumerate  the  variety  of  characters  created,  running 
as  they  do  the  whole  gamut  of  manhood  and  womanhood,  and 
reaching  beyond  into  regions  of  the  supernatural,  of  monsters 
like  Caliban  and  spirits  like  Ariel.  The  further  problems — 
problems  this  time  of  dramatic  interpretation — that  arise  in  con- 
nection with  these  aspects  of  the  work,  are  seen  to  reach  out 
indefinitely,  almost  as  endless  and  quite  as  fascinating  as  in  real 
life.  Indeed,  they  are  the  jiroblems  of  real  life.  We  seek  a  con- 
sistent explanation  of  Hamlet's  character  and  deeds  because 
Hamlet  is  a  man,  created  by  a  poet  to  whom  the  darkest  laws  of 
our  being  Avere  as  an  open  book,  and  we  know  that  somewhere 
hangs  the  key  to  the  mystery.  To  interpret  the  character  of  this 
figure  in  a  play  becomes  as  legitimate  an  exercise  of  the  reason 
as  to  interpret  the  deeds  of  Cwsar  in  history.  These  things, 
however,  must  be  left  to  the  student  as  he  finds  his  way  into  the 
deeper  study  of  Shakespeare;  they  are  not  for  discussion  here. 

Likewise,  the  question  of  Shakespeare's  philosophy  of  life 
is  not  one  upon  which  to  linger.  To  inquire  very  seriously  into 
jj^g  the  "teaching"  of  his  dramas  would  be  quite  to  miss 

Philosophy,  their  purpose.  Always,  "the  play's  the  thing." 
The  play  exists  for  our  amusement,  our  admiration, 
the  satisfaction  of  our  cravings  for  emotional  stimulus,  rather 
than  for  explicit  spiritual  guidance.     At  the  same  time  Shake- 


SHAKESPEARE  117 

speare  was  well  aware  that  to  play  thus  upon  the  spirit  with 
counterfeits  of  life,  was  to  play  also  upon  the  moral  sense;  the 
play  within  Hamlet  is  a  thing  wherein  to  "catch  the  conscience" 
of  the  king.  The  dramas  may  have  therefore  a  moral  drift. 
Spirituality  of  a  religious  t}^e  is  not  conspicuous.  This,  it  has 
been  affirmed,  is  a  point  in  which  Shakespeare  failed  to  grasp 
quite  the  whole  range  of  the  human  soul.  The  sense  of  an  etenml 
future  to  which  the  present  is  but  prelusive,  of  an  overruling 
Providence  to  whom  the  conduct  of  all  mortal  affairs  must 
finally  be  referred,  seems  in  him  not  strong  or  abiding.  Cer- 
tainly the  life  of  holiness  and  spiritual  aspiration  Avhicli  wa^ 
the  ideal  of  so  many  of  the  best  minds  of  the  middle  ages  en- 
gaged his  attention  but  little;  nor  does  he  concern  himself, 
as  men  like  Milton  and  Bunyan  in  a  later  age  do,  with  justi- 
fying the  ways  of  God  to  man.  This,  we  may  take  it,  is  the 
sum  total  of  the  charge.  No  one  could  possibly  wish  to  nar- 
row him  to  the  Dante  or  Milton  measure;  only  critics  have  been 
known  to  wish  that  he  had  somewhere  shown  a  fuller  appre- 
ciation of  the  heights  and  depths  of  that  measure.  But  even  if 
this  be  admitted,  and  also  the  point  that  he  leaves  the  question 
of  the  hereafter  in  the  dark,  where  the  intellect  unaided  by  faith 
must  leave  it,  he  finds  still  a  vital  religion  in  human  sympathy 
and  duty.  Man  as  man,  in  every  age  of  the  world  and  every 
station  in  life,  calls  forth  his  interest,  and  there  is  no  recess  of  the 
human  heart  which  his  understanding  has  not  illuminated.  He 
reads  the  motives  of  the  lowest  as  well  as  of  the  highest  of  men, 
and  makes  us  feel  much  the  same  tolerant  sympathy  for  them 
that  they  must  feel  for  themselves,  because  he  puts  us  so  entirely 
in  possession  of  their  point  of  view.  This  fundamental  hu- 
manity of  the  poet  is  best  revealed  in  two  things  which  the 
limits  of  our  space  will  not  allow  us  to  dwell  on  here.  The 
one  is  his  humor,  which  is  not  only  the  basis  of  his  comedies, 
the  most  perfect  exemplification  of  the  comic  spirit  ever 
created,  but  which  colors  also  the  warp  and  woof  of  his  dark- 
est   tragedies;    and    humor    in    its    perfection  can   onh'  gruv/ 


118  THE   ELIZABETHAN   DRAMA 

from  this  same  tolerant  sympathy  that  embraces  all  the 
follies  and  inconsistencies  of  men.  The  other  is  his  por- 
traiture of  women,  which  in  insight  and  reverence  also 
surpasses  anything  of  the  kind  that  we  know,  giving  us 
a  gallery  of  characters  that  must  be  the  admiration  of 
every  age.  Taking  the  plays  all  in  all,  the  great  virtue  of  wide- 
embracing  charity  could  not  be  more  effectively  preached. 
Moreover,  it  is  to  be  noted  that  even  when  Shakespeare  tolerates 
infirmity  and  vice,  he  does  not  condone.  Over  against  baseness 
of  character  and  action  he  always  sets  some  nobility;  and  there 
is  no  question  which  of  the  two  is  commended.  Nor  is  there  any 
question  as  to  the  ultimate  issues  of  good  or  evil.  The  personal 
and  social  virtues  are  held  up  to  praise.  If  the  evil  seems  to 
triumph,  it  is  not  with  applause;  but  seldom  does  it  even  seem  to 
triumph.  The  plays,  in  short,  are  moral  precisely  as  life  is 
moral;  there  is  absolute  respect  for  the  law  that  in  human  life 
apportions  finally  to  every  deed  a  reward  in  its  own  kind. 

All  that  has  been  said  of  Shakespeare  as  a  dramatist  is 
cumulative  evidence  of  his  title  to  the  name  of  poet.  Yet  of  the 
„  .  ,  essential  qualities  of  a  poet,  as  distinct  from  any 
Poetry.  special  function,  something  remains  to  be  said.  These 

qualities  consist  in  the  imaginative  grasp  of  reality 
and  truth — ideality,  if  one  please  to  call  it  so — and  the  musical 
utterance  of  it.  In  these  also,  Shakespeare  seems  to  our 
present  comprehension  the  final  master.  Collect  his  utterances 
upon  any  topic  of  human  interest, — ^youth,  age,  vanity,  mercy, 
sleep,  tears,  music,  poetry  itself, — and  mark  at  once  the  profound 
truth  of  his  observations  and  the  luminous  and  harmonious  ex- 
pression of  them.  Take  Macbeth' s  picture  of  night,  where  by 
a  single  stroke  is  conjured  up  a  vision  of  almost  appalling  mag- 
nitude and  dread, — 

"  Now  o'er  the  one  half-world 
Nature  seems  dead,  and  wicked  dreams  abuse 
The  curtain 'd  sleep;" 


SHAKESPEARE  119 

take  the  whole  of  the  long  apostrophe  to  sleep  in  the  third  act  of 
2  Henrif  IV.,  of  which  a  fragment  may  be  quoted, — 

"  Wilt  thou  upon  the  high  and  giddy  mast 

Seal  up  the  ship-boy's  eyes,  and  rock  his  brains 
In  cradle  of  the  rude  imperious  surge;" 

take  Cleopatra's  dream  of  Antony's  imperial  greatness, 

"  His  legs  bestrid  the  ocean;  his  rear'd  arm 
Crested  the  world;  his  voice  was  propertied 
As  all  the  tuned  spheres ; ' ' 

take  Hamlet's  declaration  of  faithfulness  to  the  memor)'  of  his 
father's  spirit, 

"  Remember  thee? 
Yea,  from  the  table  of  my  memory 
I'll  wipe  away  all  trivial  fond  records, 
All  saws  of  books,  all  forms,  all  pressures  past, 
That  youth  and  observation  copied  there. 
And  thy  commandment  all  alone  shall  live 
Within  the  book  and  volume  of  my  brain, 
Unmix'd  with  baser  matter. ' ' 

Is  it  conceivable  that  these  things  could  be  surpassed  in  their 
truth  whether  to  fact  or  fancy,  or  could  be  more  aptly  and  beau- 
tifully said  ?  The  same  poetic  faculty  is  revealed  in  a  multitude 
of  single  epithets  of  every  kind — "the  bubble  reputation," 
"vaulting  ambition,"  "mortal  coil," — more  especially  perhaps 
in  epithets  descriptive  of  some  object  or  phenomenon  of  nature, 
such  as  "the  shard-borne  beetle,"  " black-brow'd  night," 
"spongy  April,"  "the  mutinous  winds,"  "the  multitudinous 
seas,"  "the  gutter'd  rocks  and  congregated  sands."  There  is 
no  trace  of  superfluity  in  the  two  opening  lines  of  Chaucer's 
Prologue,  and  yet  "spongy  April"  compresses  their  whole  mean- 
ing into  two  words.  The  variety  of  images,  too,  under  which  a 
single  idea  is  conceived  is  evidence  of  the  genuinely  creative 
mind.  It  is  not  that  Shakespeare  never  repeats  himself.  In 
minor  matters  he  does.  His  woods  are  "thorny,"  his  butter- 
flies "gilded,"  his  steeds  "fiery,"  or  "barbed,"  or  "neighing," 


120  'LUE  ELIZABTEHAX   DRAMA 

more  than  once.  But  phrases  rarely  become  conventional  in  his 
hands,  and  wherever  actual  imagery  is  involved,  the  freshness 
and  fertility  of  his  imagination  are  amazing.  Thus  the  rainbow 
is  now  the  "watery  arch,"  now  the  "many  colored  messenger," 
now  the  "blue  Iris,"  and  now  the  "blue  bow"  crowning  the 
"bosky  acres."  The  "rosy-fingered  Aurora"  of  Homer  comes 
in  wholly  new  guises;  Aurora  herself  appears'  only  in  two  of  the 
earliest  plays.     Instead,  we  have  half  a  hundred  variations: 

"  The  eastern  gate,  all  fiery-red. 
Opening  on  Neptune  witli  fair  blessed  beams, 
Turns  into  yellow  gold  his  salt  green  streams. ' ' 

"  The  early  village-cock 
Hath  twice  done  salutation  to  the  mom." 

"  The  glow-worm  shows  the  matin  to  be  near, 
And  'gins  to  pale  his  unefTectual  fire." 

"  But,  soft  I  methinks  I  scent  the  morning  air." 

"  But,  look,  the  mom,  in  russet  mantle  clad, 
Walks  o'er  the  dew  of  yon  high  eastward  hill." 

"  Night's  candles  are  burnt  out,  and  jocund  day 
Stands  tiptoe  on  the  misty  mountain  tops. ' ' 

"  But  when  from  under  this  terrestrial  ball 
He  fires  the  proud  tops  of  the  eastern  pines. ' ' 

Such  is  the  quality  of  an  imagination  which,  since  words  are 
powerless  to  describe  it,  must  be  felt  in  its  actual  workings  or  not 
at  all.  We  know  that  Shakespeare  died  before  the  decay  of  his 
faculties,  and  we  therefore  please  ourselves  with  thinking  that 
to  the  very  last,  in  his  quiet  retreat  from  the  world  at  Stratford, 
he  rested  content  and  self-contained,  his  work  finished,  his 
wisdom  ripened,  his  brain  still  silently  coining  the  sights  and 
sounds  of  life  and  nature  into  an  unrecorded  poetry  of  supernal 
loveliness.  Xo  play,  indeed,  is  richer  in  pure  imaginative  charm 
than  The  Tempe.it,  one  of  the  very  last  which  he  wrote;  and  from 
it  has  been  selected  for  inscription  upon  his  monuinent  in  West- 


BEN  JOXSON 


121 


minster  Abbey  a  portion  of  the  speecii  of  Prospero,  a  passage 
which  marks  perhaps  as  high  a  reach  as  poetry  has  yet  attained. 

"These  our  actors, 
As  I  foretold  you,  were  all  spirits,  and 
Are  melted  into  air,  into  thin  air : 
And,  like  the  baseless  fabric  of  this  vision. 
The  cloud-capp'd  towers,  the  gorgeous  palaces, 
The  solemn  temples,  the  great  globe  itself. 
Yea,  all  which  it  inherit,  sliall  dissolve. 
And,  like  this  insubstantial  pageant  faded. 
Leave  not  a  rack  behind.     We  are  such  stuff 
As  dreams  are  made  on;  and  our  little  life 
Ts  rounded  with  a  sleep." 


Good  mEND  rm  k^vs  sm€  foiuieaee,. 

TO  Dice   'RE  DVST  ENCLQASED  KAI^Et 
BlESE  be  f  HAH  ^SmgErTiEX  STONES 


Inscription  on  stone  ubove  Sltakesj>tare's  grave  in  Slratfonl  Church. 

Next  to  Shakespeare  among  the  dramatists  of  this  period, 

both  in  time  and  in   general  importance,  stands   Ben   Jonson. 

Beginning  in  1598  or  earlier  with  Every  Man  in  his 
Ben  Jonson,  jj  i       •         i  •  i    ci     i  j.    ]  ^ 

15739-16S7   ^^^^'^(^^f  ^  pl^y  11^  which  hhakespeare  acted  a  part, 

he  took  at  once  a  position  of  prominence,  and  by 

his  vigorous  personality,  his  dramatic  and  other  literary  work, 

and  his  rise  to  royal  favor  and  the  Laiireateship  under  James, 

came  to  be  the  dominant  literary  figure  of  the  age.     He  was  huge 

of  body,  like  Dr.  Johnson,  the  literary  dictator  of  more  than  a 

century  later,  and  like  him  also,  was  afflicted  with  disease.     But 

an  indomitable  energy  marked  every  step  of  his  career.     He  was 

of  Border  descent,  though  j)r()bably  born  in  Westminster.     He 

was  taken  early  from  Westininster  school  and  set  to  work  with  a 

bricklayer's  trowel,  but,  while  yet  a  ])oy,  joired  the  army  in  the 

Netherlands,  where,  he  boasted,  he  killctl  one  of  the  enemy  in 


122  THE  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA 

personal  combat.  Then,  returning  to  London,  he  fell  into  the 
wild  life  of  the  actors  and  was  once  tried  for  killing  a  fellow- 
player  in  a  duel.  His  bluff  and  blustering  nature  may  have 
easily  provoked  quarrels,  but  his  extraordinary  talents  compelled 
respect  and  won  him  renown.  It  is  characteristic  of  the  time 
that  such  a  man  should  have  been  found  now  in  prison,  now 
engaged  in  contests  of  wit  Avith  Shakespeare  and  others  at  the 
Mermaid  Tavern,  and  now  dining  in  the  chambers  of  the  king. 
It  is  equally  characteristic  that  this  same  man,  after  living 
through  the  reign  of  James  and  half  through  that  of  Charles, 
writing  a  score  of  dramas  and  twice  as  many  masques  and  enter- 
tainments, besides  numerous  minor  things,  should  have  died 
in  poverty,  writing  still  with  such  reiiniants  of  energy  as  dissipa- 
tion and  disease  had  left  him.'^ 

The  defect  of  Jon.son  as  a  dramatist  may  be  described  in  a 
word.  It  is  the  inability  to  set  forth  character  as  we  have  seen 
character  exemplified  in  Shakespeare.  Instead,  to  take  a  name 
from  his  first  play,  he  sets  forth  "humours."  This  word 
"humour"  (for  humor  in  our  sense  was  not  in  any  marked  degree 
Jonson's)  means  with  him  an  idiosyncrasy,  that  is,  a  personal 
peculiarity  of  temperament,  a  bias,  a  manner,  a  ruling  passion, 
a  whim.  Something  like  this  Marlowe  had  portrayed  on 
a  heroic  scale.  But  heroism  of  the  grandiose  t^^je  was  not  for 
Jonson.  Though  he  wrote  two  tragedies  of  the  lofty  kind 
(Sejanus  and  Catiline),  he  was  essentially  a  realist,  caring  less 
for  the  field  of  romantic  tragedy  than  of  realistic  comedy.  He 
aimed  particularly  to  satirize  the  follies  of  his  day. 

"  With  an  armed  and  resolved  hand 
I'll  .strip  the  ragged  follies  of  the  time 
Naked  as  at  their  birth." 

(Prologue  to  Every  man  Out  of  his  Humour.) 

This  he  did  by  taking   some  vice,  eccentricity,  or  affectation, 

*  Jonson's  posthumous  volume  (1641)  of  notes  and  reflections  on  various 
subjects,  knowTi  as  Timber,  or  Discoveries  Made  upon  Men  and  Matter,  Is  an 
admirable  example  both  of  masculine  thought  and  of  direct,  vigorous  prose. 


BEN  JONSON  123 

personifying  it  by  a  name  that  expressed  its  character,  and 
making  it  play  its  part.  His  three  best  comedies  are  Volpone, 
or  the  Fox;  Epica^ne,  or  the  Silent  Woman;  and  The  Alchemist. 
In  these  he  comes  nearest  to  portraying  genuine  charac- 
ters, but  the  "humours"  are  still  plainly  apparent.  Volpone 
is  a  transcendent  villain,  who  delights  in  ministering  to  his 
evil  desires  by  entangling  lesser  villains  in  the  nets  of  their  own. 
Epiccene  is  a  pretended  Avoman  who  feigns  to  be  of  a  silent 
disposition  before  her  marriage  to  a  man  whose  peculiar  mono- 
mania is  horror  of  noise.  The  Alchemist  is  another  arch- 
deceiver  whose  special  method  of  gulling  the  gullible  satirizes  the 
foolish  search  for  the  philosopher's  stone.  All  are  comedies  of 
manners,  excellent,  indeed,  but  very  different  from  the  romantic 
comedies  of"  sentiment  in  which  Shakespeare's  finer  fancy 
delighted. 

Jonson's  merits  are  no  less  conspicuous.  In  the  first  place, 
he  was  sturdily  independent;  he  eschewed  romanticism,  not 
folloAving.  Shakespeare,  as  others  were  disposed  to  do,  but 
warmly  espousing  the  cause  of  realism  and  the  classical  ideals 
of  dramatic  method.  Perhaps  this  reversion  is  due  in  part  to 
his  learning,  for  Jonson  was  exceedingly  learned.  He  mastered 
the  erudition  of  antiquity  as  he  did  the  obscurest  chicaneries 
of  London  quacks  and  thieves,  and  kept  it  all  in  his  capacious 
memory  to  be  poured  out  at  need.  Of  course  it  little  helps  a 
play  to  have  a  character  talking  of 

"your  chrysosperinc, 
Your  sal,  your  sulphur,  and  your  mercury, 
Your  marchesite,  your  tutie,  your  magnesia," 

but  the  learning  is  never  wholly  inappropriate.  In  the  second 
place,  he  was,  at  his  best,  a  master  of  plot  and  action.  Coleridge 
regarded  The  Alchemist  as  having  a  plot  of  almost  "absolute 
perfection;"  and  those  who  have  had  the  good  fortune  to  see 
the  play  on  the  boards  know  that  it  is  one  of  the  most  breathless 
and  unflagging  pieces  of  action  ever  staged.  Then,  in  the  third 
place,  he  was  equally  a  master  of  scenical  effects.  This  was 
shown  in  the  court -masques  to  which  he  devoted  his  talents  at  the 


124  THE   ELIZABETHAN    DKAMA 

instigation  of  the  pleas jre  loving  James  I.  The  masque  is  a 
species  of  entertainment  standing  midway  between  a  pageant 
or  a  pantomime  and  a  regular  play.  It  was  in  part  a  natural 
development  from  the  old  English  social  entertainments  known 
as  "disguisings" — our  modern  "masquerades" — in  which 
dancing  was  almost  always  a  feature;  but  it  took  its  final,  elabo- 
rate stage-form  under  the  influence  of  the  masque  as  already 
fully  developed  in  Italy.  Enormous  sums  of  money  came  to  be 
expended  upon  these  spectacles,  which  in  the  splendor  of  their 
accessories  offered  a  strong  contrast  to  the  bareness  of  the  scenes 
in  the  regular  theatres;  and  at  this  time  Jonson  the  poet,  Inigo 
Jones  the  architect,  and  Ferrabosco  the  Italian  music  master, 
vied  with  one  another  in  the  ingenuity  of  their  several  contri- 
butions. Jonson's  special  service  lay  in  elevating  the  masque 
to  a  position  near  the  drama  by  supplying  the  dramatic  elements 
of  plot  and  dialogue  and  giving  them  a  literary  value,  at  the 
same  time  adapting  them  to  the  scenical  requirements. 

Finally,  to  these  dramatic  virtues  should  be  added  Jonson's 
lyrical  gifts,  which  were  nearly  on  a  level  with  those  of  the  best 
poets  of  that  lyrical  age.  His  plays,  especially  his  masques,  are 
sprinkled  with  songs  of  every  variety.  He  published  also  several 
volumes,  notably  Underwoods  and  The  Forest  (1616),  made  up 
largcily  of  that  class  of  short,  occasional  poems  which,  often  for 
want  of  a  title,  become  best  known  to  fame  by  their  first  lines, 
.\mong  them  is  the  celebrated  song  "To  Celia,"  Avhich,  though 
but  a  paraphrase  of  sixteen  lines,  from  the  Greek  Philostratus, 
stands  among  the  foremost  lyrics  in  our  literature: — 

"Drink  to  mo,  only  with  thino  eyes, 

And  I  will  pledge  with  mine; 
Or  leave  a  kLss  but  in  the  cup, 

And  I'll  not  look  for  wine. 
The  thirst,  that  from  the  soul  doth  rise, 

D(jth  ask  a  drink  divine: 
But  might  I  of  Jove's  nectar  sup, 

I  would  not  change  for  thine. 


BEAUMONT  AND  FLETCHER  125 

"I  sent  thee  late  a  rosy  wreath, 
Not  so  much  honoring  thee. 
As  giving  it  a  hope,  that  there 
'  It  could  not  wither 'd  be. 

But  thou  thereon  didst  only  breathe, 

And  sent'st  it  back  to  me: 
Since  when  it  grows,  and  smells,  I  swear. 
Not  of  itself,  but  thee." 

The  names  of  Beaumont  and  Fletcher  are  always  con- 
joined, because  they  are  known  to  have  collaborated  in  a  number 
of  plays,  and  because  it  is  often  impossible  to  distinguish  either 
their  respective  parts  in  these  plays  or  their  separate  produc- 
tions. Both  came  of  better  families  than  most  of  the 
rancis  dramatists;  one  was  educated  at  Oxford,  the  other 
r>S'-i6i6  ^^  Cambridge;  and  they  lived  together  at  London. 
John  Both  were  friends  of  Jonson,  whom  Beaumont  ad- 

Fletclier,        dressetl  in  a  well-known  poem : — 

1579-162',. 

"What  things  have  we  seen 

Done  at  the  Mermaid!" 

Fletcher,  it  is  just  possible,  had  the  assistance  of  Shakespeare  in 
writing  The  Two  Noble  Kinsmen;  at  any  rate,  the  play  seems 
to  show  traces  of  Shakespeare's  hand;  and  Shakespeare's  Henry 
VIII.,  as  we  have  it,  shows  pretty  clear  traces  of  Fletcher's  hand. 
Since  Beaumont  died  at  thirty-two,  Fletcher,  the  elder  and 
longer-lived  of  the  pair,  certainly  had  the  larger  share  in  the 
fifty-two  plays  that  pass  under  their  names.  He  was  sole  author 
of  some,  notably  The  Faithful  Shepherdess  (c.  1G09),  a  beautiful 
pastoral  drama,  and  a  worthy  forerunner  of  Jonson's  unfinished 
Sad  Shepherd  and  INIilton's  Comus.  Of  the  products  of  their 
joint  authorship,  Philasfer  (c.  1608)  and  TJie  Maid's  Tragedy 
(c.  1610)  may  be  sj)cciaJly  mentioned. 

Their  plays  may  nearly  all  be  described  as  romantic  come- 
dies or  tragedies,  somewhat  of  the  Shakespearean  kind,  difTeriiig 
decidedly  from  Jonson's  realistic  comedies  of  manners.  But 
they  could  not  be  mistaken  for  Shakespeare's  work.     In  the  ver- 


12C  TflE    KUZABETHAX    DRAMA 

sification,  surplus  syllables  are  freely  admitted,  and  there  is 
especially  manifest  a  liking  for  double  or  triple  endings. 

"Thy  brother, 
While  he  was  good,  I  call'd  him  king;  and  served  him 
With  that  strong  faitli,  that  most  unwearied  valor, 
PuU'd  people  from  the  farthest  suns  to  seek  him, 
And  beg  his  friendship.     I  was  then  his  soldier."  * 

(Th£  MaUVa  Tragedy,  V.  iii.) 

Whatever  may  be  the  merits  of  this  movement,  it  is  certainly 
less  firm,  less  suited  to  heroic  or  impressive  speech,  than  lines 
with  a  prevalent  masculine  ending.  In  moral  tone,  the  plays 
are  appreciably  lower  than  Shakespeare's.  The  language  is 
less  refined,  and  vice  itself  is  not  only  tolerated  as  a  necessary 
constituent  of  plays  that  represent  life,  but  it  is  often  allowefl 
to  pass  without  entailing  its  logical  consequences.  In  loftiness 
of  thought  and  imagination,  finally,  they  never  touch  the  Shake- 
spearean heights.  Nevertheless,  the  plays  are  almost  invariably 
well  constructed.  Their  plots  have  abundant  action,  their 
characters  are  full  of  life,  their  diction  is  poetic,  their  humor 
and  pathos  unfailingly  effective.  Extremely  popular  in  their 
own  day,  for  more  than  two  centuries  they  held  the  stage  suc- 
cessfully against  all  rivals,  and  will  bear  revival  still. 

Very  different  are  the  works  of  John  Webster,  the  author 
of  two  remarkable  examples  of    the    so-called    "tragedies  of 

blood"  (of  which  Shakespeare's  Titus  Andronicus 
nr  i^  f  is  also  a  specimen),  namely.  The  White  Devil  (1612), 

,.  2680-  ^"d  ^^^  Diichess  of  Malfi  (acted  1616).  The  interest 
1625?  that  inheres  in  these  two  really  great  plays  is  one  of 

such  unrelieved  tragic  horror  that  they  are  scarcely 
suited  to  presentation  on  the  stage.  "  Pleasure  of  life,  what  is 
it?"  asks  the  dying  Antonio  in  the  latter  play,  as  he  reviews  his 
own  troubled  existence, — "Only  the  good  hours  of  an  ague;" 
and   as  the  characters   die,   one  after  another,  by  stranglers' 

♦Compare  the  endings  in  the  soliloquy  of  Wolsey  in  Shakespeare's  Henri/ 
VIII-,  III.,  li,  a  portion  almost  certainly  written  by  Fletcher. 


WEBSTER 


127 


cords,  poisoned  kisses,  and  daggers,  the  reader  who  follows 
with  sympathy  is  moved  to  a  horrified  assent. 

"We  are  merely  the  stars'  tennis-balls,  struck  and  banded 
Which  way  pleases  them." — (Ibid.,  V.  iv.) 

Yet  Web.ster  is,  as  even  these  brief  ({notations  may  show,  a 
dramatist  of  tremendous  power  both  of  scene  and  phrase.  He 
has  not  the  varied  excellences  that  went  to  make,  either  popular 
playwrights  like  Jonson,  Beaumont,  and  Fletcher,  or  a  transcend- 
ant  dramatist  and  poet  like  Shakespeare,  but  in  the  single  quality 
of  intensity  of  imagination  he  quite  excels  the  former  and  is 
hardly  surpassed  by  Shakespeare  himself.  Certainly  no  other 
among  the  many  remaining  dramatists  who,  each  with  some 
.special  excellence,  helped  to  make  illustrious  the  annals  of  the 
stage  through  the  reigns  of  Elizabeth  and  the  first  Stuarts,  may 
so  confidently  be  mentioned  in  company  with  these. 


Interior  of  a  London  Thtatrt,  J«»?. 


CHAPTER  X 

ELIZABETHAN    PROSE 

LYLY     HOOKER     BACON     BURTON     THE  KINC  JAMES  BIBLE 

The  history  of  EHzabethan  prose  takes  us  well  back  again 
to  the  time  when  Spenser's  early  poems  were  preluding  the  true 
Elizabethan  poetry.  After  the  posthumous  publication,  in 
1570,  of  the  Scholemaster  of  Roger  Ascham,  whom  we  have 
treated  as  a  pre-Elizabethan,  the  first  prose  work  of  literary 
importance  outside  of  the  chronicles  of  Holinshed 
John  Lyhj,  (i57g)  ^^j  Hakluyt  (1582),  etc.,  was  John  Lyly's 
'  Euphues,  the  Anatomy  of  Wit,  published  in  1579, 
and  followed  the  next  year  by  a  sequel,  Euphues  and  his  England. 
In  framework,  this  is  a  romance,  not  of  the  chivalresque  but  of 
the  mild  society  t^'jjc,  in  which  a  gentleman  of  Athens,  after 
wooing  a  lady  at  Naples,  is  made  to  pursue  his  further  fortunes 
in  England.  In  substance,  it  is  a  didactic  treatise  on  such  things 
as  court  manners,  love,  education,  and  religion.  But  the  book 
is  remembered  to-day  because  of  the  extreme  to  which  it  carried 
a  style  then  somewhat  prevalent  in  Europe.  The  marks  of 
this  style,  thenceforth  known  as  "Euphuism,"  are  excessive 
balance  and  antithesis,  often  enforced  by  alliteration  and  even 
rhyme,  and  endless  fantastical  similes  drawn  sometimes  from 
the  mythical  properties  of  plants  and  animals — the  hyssop,  the 
salamander,  the  "serpent  Porphirius," — as  described  in  old 
herbals  and  bestiaries.  Here  is  an  example  of  the  style  at  its 
best : — 

"  The  rose  that  is  eaten  with  the  canker  is  not  gathered  be- 
oause  it  groweth  on  that  stalk  that  the  sweet  tloth,  neither  was 
Helen  made  a  star,  because  she  came  of  that  egg  with  Castor,  nor  tliou 

128 


Queen  Kljzabeth   in  l~{)i 

From  the  Portrait  at  Ditchley 


LYLY  ,  129 

a  gentleman  in  that  thy  ancestors  were  of  nobiUty.  It  is  not  the  des- 
cent of  birth  but  the  consent  of  conditions  that  maketh  gentlemen, 
neither  great  manors  but  good  manners  that  express  the  true  image 
of  dignity.  There  is  copper  coin  of  the  stamp  that  gold  is,  yet  is  it 
not  current;  there  cometh  poison  of  the  fish  as  well  as  good  oil,  yet 
is  it  not  wholesome;  and  of  man  may  proceed  an  evil  child  and  yet 
no  gentleman.  For  as  the  wine  that  runneth  on  the  lees  is  not  there- 
fore to  be  accounted  neat  because  it  was  drawn  of  the  same  piece; 
or  as  the  water  that  springeth  from  the  fountain's  head  and  floweth 
into  the  filthy  channel  is  not  to  be  called  clear  because  it  came  of  the 
same  stream ;  so  neither  is  he  that  descendeth  of  noble  parentage,  if  he 
desist  from  noble  deeds,  to  be  esteemed  a  gentleman  in  that  he  issued 
from  the  loins  of  a  noble  sire,  for  that  he  obscureth  the  parents  he 
came  of,  and  diserediteth  his  own  estate." 

At  its  Avorst  the  style  deserved  the  ridicule  which  Shakespeare  put 
upon  it  through  the  pedant  Holofernes  in  Loves  Labor's  Lost* 
and  in  spite  of  its  popularity  at  court  and  some  possibly  good 
influence  in  shaping  English  prose  by  showing  that  there  is 
virtue  in  balance  and  symmetry,  it  was  destined  speedily  to 
perish  of  its  own  extravagance. 

About  this  same  time  Sidney  must  have  been  engaged  upon 
his  prose  works,  already  mentioned,  the  Defence  of  Poesy,  and 
the  long,  half  chivalresque,  half  pastoral  tale  of  Arcadia.  The 
latter  shows  some  traces  of  Euphuism,  together  with  other  dis- 
tortions of  fancy,  or  tortured  figures  of  speech,  better  known  as 
"conceits."  The  two  books  well  represent  two  prevalent  kinds 
of  prose — scholastic  treatises,  and  romances.  Quite  the  best 
of  the  latter,  regarded  purely  as  a  romance,  was  Thomas  Lodge's 
Rosalynde  (1590),  a  little  pastoral  which  gave  Shakespeare  the 
plot  of  As  You  Like  It.  Besides  these,  there  were  many  travel- 
lers' chronicles;  and  there  were  tracts  or  pamphlets,  serious, 
satirical,  and  humorous,  printed  in  great  numbers  on  all  con- 
ceivable subjects.     The  style  ranged  from  Latin  heaviness  and 

*'' Holofernes.  This  is  a  gift  that  I  have,  simple,  simple;  a  foolish  ex- 
travagant spirit,  full  of  forms,  figures,  shapes,  objects,  ideas,  apprehensions, 
motions,  revolutions:  these  are  begojt  i,n  the  ventricle  of  memory,  nourished  in 
the  womb  of  pia  mater,  and  delivered  Ti^n  the  mellowing  of  occasion.  But  the 
gift  is  good  in  tho.se  in  whom  it  is  acute,  and  I  am  thankful  for  it."— Act  IV., 
Scene  ii. 


130  .  ELIZABETHAN    PROSE 

intricacy  to  vernacular  license,  cumbrous  when  there  was  an 
attempt  at  formality,  grammatically  unformed  when  there  was 
not.  But  in  the  next  decade  two  writers,  very  dissimilar  indeed, 
rose  above  the  throng  by  superior  worth  of  matter  as  well  as  by 
perfection  of  style.  The  first  of  these  was  Richard  Hooker,  the 
second  and  more  lastingly  important,  Francis  Bacon. 

Hooker  was  a  churchman  who  wrote  an  elaborate  treatise 
on  Ecclesiastical  Polity,  defending  the  principles  into  which  the 
English  Church  had  settled  since  the  Reformation, 
„    ,  especially  under  the  wise  policy  of  Elizabeth,  at  the 

1.5549-1600.  same  time  opposing  the  narrower  views  of  the  Puri- 
tans, who  were  already  threatening  to  bring  about  a 
schism.  Four  books  of  the  treatise  were  published  in  1594,  a 
fifth  in  1597,  and  three  more  after  the  author's  death.  The 
work  is  notable  for  its  philosophy  and  its  style, — for  the  way  in 
which  it  shows  that  behind  what  looks  like  an  accidental  com- 
promise in  church  policy  are  really  the  workings  of  law,  and  for 
the  harmonious  numbers  of  its  long-linked,  Latin-like  clauses. 
A  reverent  sense  of  the  reign  of  law,  natural  and  supernatural, 
lifts  it,  style  and  all,  into  the  category  of  great  books. 

"Concerning  faith,  the  principal  object  whereof  is  that  eternal 
verity  which  hath  discovered  the  treasures  of  hidden  wisdom  in 
Christ;  concerning  hope,  the  highest  object  whereof  is  that  everlast- 
ing goodness  which  in  Christ  doth  quicken  the  dead;  concerning 
charity,  the  final  object  whereof  is  that  incomprehensible  beauty 
which  shineth  in  the  countenance  of  Christ  the  Son  of  the  living  God : 
concerning  these  Adrtues,  the  first  of  which  beginning  here  with  a 
weak  apprehension  of  things  not  seen,  endeth  with  the  intuitive  vision 
of  God  in  the  world  to  come;  the  second  beginning  here  with  a 
trembling  expectation  of  things  far  removed  and  as  yet  but  only 
heard  of,  endeth  with  real  and  actual  fruition  of  that  which  no  tongue 
can  express ;  the  third  beginning  here  with  a  weak  inclination  of  heart 
towards  him  unto  whom  we  are  not  able  to  approach,  endeth  with 
endless  union,  the  mystery  whereof  is  higher  than  the  reach  of  the 
thoughts  of  men;  concerning  that  faith,  hope,  and  charity,  without 
which  there  can  be  no  salvation,  was  there  ever  any  mention  made 
saving  only  in  that  law    which    God  himself  hath  from  heaven  re- 


BACON  131 

vealed?  There  is  not  in  the  world  a  syllable  muttered  with  certain 
truth  concerning  any  of  these  three,  more  than  hath  been  super- 
naturally  received  from  the  mouth  of  the  eternal  God." — Book 
I,  xi.  6. 

Wholly  unlike  Hooker,  except  for  the  fundamental  spirit 
of  philosophical  inquiry  which  equally  characterizes  his  works, 
was  the  statesman,  Francis  Bacon.  He  was  a  son  of 
Francis  Elizabeth's  Lord  Keeper  and  a  nephew  of  her 
Bacon,  Treasurer,  Lord  Burleigh,  but  though  an  able  law- 

1561-1626.  yer,  and  member  of  Parliament,  his  advancement  was 
tardy  during  her  reign;  under  James,  however,  he 
held  various  posts  of  honor,  attaining  finally  to  the  position  of 
Chancellor,  when  he  was  created  a  peer  with  the  title  of  Baron 
Verulam.  This  last  was  in  1618.  Three  years  later  he  was 
tried  for  bribery,  fined,  imprisoned,  and  banished  from  court. 
The  sentence  was  soon  remitted,  and  he  returned  to  a  semi- 
public  life.  He  died,  in  1626,  of  a  cold  caught  while  experi- 
menting with  snow  as  a  preservative. 

Bacon's  written  works  are  a  far  nobler  monument  than  his 
public  career.  Endowed  with  a  sagacious  mind,  in  which  emo- 
tional quahties  were  quite  dominated  by  purely  intellectual  ones, 
he  was  admirably  fitted  for  the  calm  investigation  of  truth  and 
the  application  of  it  in  writing  to  a  practical  morality  and  the 
uses  of  daily  life.  His  special  contribution  to  science  lay  in  his 
insistence  upon  the  inductive  method — the  method  of  reasoning 
from  patiently  observed  and  classified  phenomena.  His  purely 
philosophical  and  scientific  treatises,  such  as  the  Novum  Or- 
ganum  and  others,  which  gave  so  marked  a  stimulus  to  scientific 
research,  he  preferred  to  write  in  Latin,  as  the  more  general  and, 
in  his  belief,  the  more  enduring  language.  But  several  works 
of  importance,  besides  his  Esmys,  were  written  in  English.  Such 
was  the  Advancement  of  Learning,  which  was  published,  with 
a  dedication  to  the  king,  in  1605.  In  this  book  he  argues,  in  a 
most  elaborate  and  systematic  manner,  for  the  dignity  of  learn- 
ing, and  draws  a  comprehensive  map  of  the  field  of  knowledge, 


132  ELIZABETHAN   PROSE 

both  explored  and  unexplored,  making  "as  it  were  a  small  globe 
of  the  intellectual  world."  The  style  is  without  any  of  Hooker's 
harmonies,  but  is  everywhere  dignified  and  vigorous,  the  efficient 
instrument  of  a  masculine  thinker;  and  the  subject-matter  is 
enlivened  with  a  wealth  of  illustration,  analogy,  and  anecdote. 
For  a  mellower  tone,  one  should  turn  to  his  philosophical  ro- 
mance, the  New  Atlantis,  another  of  those  pictures  of  an  ideal 
State  of  which  there  have  been  not  a  few,  from  Sir  Thomas 
More's  Utopia  to  William  Morris's  A  Dream  of  John  Ball. 

The  Essays  have  proved  to  be  his  most  vital  work.  Ten 
were  published  in  1597,  an  enlarged  edition  in  1612,  and  a  final 
edition,  containing  fifty-eight,  the  year  before  his  death.  They 
are  brief  discourses  upon  large  and  varied  matters, — "dispersed 
meditations"  which  he  hoped  should  be  "as  grains  of  salt"  to 
sharpen  and  not  sate  the  appetite.  "Of  Truth"  is  the  first, 
"Of  Vicissitude  of  Things"  is  the  last,  and  between  them  is  a 
wide  range  of  themes,  containing  the  fruits  of  a  matured  experi- 
ence, always,  he  boasted,  touching  life  more  closely  than  books. 
This  last  point  alone  would  account  for  their  vitality.  The  style, 
too,  though  without  special  beauty,  is  admirable  in  its  fitness; 
for  style  with  Bacon  was  a  flexible  thing,  adapting  itself  easily  to 
his  matter  and  purpose.  In  these  Essays,  where  the  matter  is  dis- 
persed, immethodical,  incomplete,  the  expression  is  concentrated 
in  the  extreme.  The  sentences  may  have  little  to  do  with  each 
other,  but  every  sentence  is  worthy  of  the  man  whose  hearers, 
when  he  spoke,  "could  not  cough  or  look  aside  without  loss." 

"I  cannot  call  Riches  better  than  the  baggage  of  virtue.  Tho 
Roman  word  is  better,  Impedimenta.  For  a.s  the  baggage  is  to  an 
army,  so  is  riches  to  virtue.  It  cannot  bo  spared,  nor  left  behind, 
but  it  hindreth  the  march;  yea,  and  the  care  of  it  sometimes  loseth 
or  disturbeth  the  victory.  Of  great  riches  there  is  no  real  use  except 
it  be  in  the  distribution ;  the  rest  is  but  conceit.  So  saith  Solomon : 
'Where  much  is,  there  are  many  to  consume  it;  and  what  hath  the 
owner  but  the  sight  of  it  with  his  eyes?'  The  personal  fruition  in  any 
man  cannot  reach  to  feel  great  riches:  there  is  a  custody  of  them,  or 
a  power  of  dole  and  donative  of  them,  or  a  fame  of  them,  but  no  solid 


BURTON  133 

use  to  the  owner.  Do  you  not  see  what  feigned  prices  are  set  upon 
Uttle  stones  and  rarities,  and  what  works  of  ostentation  are  undertaken 
because  there  might  seem  to  be  some  use  of  great  riches?  But  then 
you  will  say,  they  may  be  of  use  to  buy  men  out  of  dangers  or  troubles. 
As  Solomon  saith, '  Riches  are  as  a  stronghold  in  the  imagination  of  the 
rich  man.'  But  this  is  excellently  expressed,  that  it  is  in  imagination, 
and  not  always  in  fact.  For  certainly  great  riches  have  sold  more  men 
than  they  have  bought  out.  Seek  not  proud  riches,  but  such  as  thou 
mayest  get  justly,  use  soberly,  distribute  cheerfully,  and  leave  con- 
tentedly." 

The  language  is  a  little  archaic.  The  ant  "  is  a  shrewd  [mischiev- 
ous] thing  in  an  orchard  or  garden."  "Mean  [lowly]  men,  in 
their  rising,  must  adhere  [stand  with  a  party]."  Yet  it  is  more 
modern,  on  the  whole,  than  the  average  Elizabethan  English, 
and  may  be  read,  with  due  allowance  for  the  obscurity  of  its  com- 
pression, without  great  difficulty.  Of  course,  it  is  the  matter  of 
the  essays  that  sustains  their  fame.  Clear  of  local  issues  or  tem- 
porary values,  striking  at  once  at  the  root  of  political  and  moral, 
if  not  exactly  spiritual,  verities,  there  seems  no  reason  why  they 
should  not  last  with  the  political  and  moral  institutions  of  men. 
After  Hooker  and  Bacon  the  age  was  not  fruitful  of  impor- 
tant prose  writers.  But  no  account  of  it  would  be  quite  com- 
plete without  the  mention  of  Robert  Burton's  Anat- 
Robert 
j^  amy  of  Melancholy  (1621),  a  curious  book  which 

1577-1640.  st^^l  leads  an  antiquarian  sort  of  existence.  Burton 
was  for  fifty  years  an  Oxford  scholar  of  recluse 
habits,  whose  special  "humour"  was  evidently  melancholy.  He 
endeavored,  in  his  ponderous  book,  half  philosophical,  half  medi- 
cal, to  "anatomize"  melancholy,  that  is,  to  set  forth  all  its  causes, 
symptoms,  and  cures.  But  he  fortifies  himself  with  such  a  con- 
glomerate mass  of  illustrations  and  quotations,  largely  I^atin, 
drawn  from  his  omnivorous  reading,  that  the  book  often  seems 
to  be  nothing  but  a  meaningless  medley.  It  really  possesses 
method,  though  not  style,  and  it  has  proved  a  great  storehouse 
of  materials  for  less  learned  writers;  Keats,  for  instance,  got  from 
it  the  suggestion  for  his  Lamia,  while  Sterne  cribbed  entire  pas- 
sages for  his  Tristram  Shandy. 

V 


134  ELIZABETHAN    PROSE. 

Nor  must  it  be  forgotten  that  the  reign  of  James  I.  brought 
forth  the  book  which,  though  not  often  treated  merely  as  litera- 
ture, is  the  foremost  masterpiece  of  modem  English 
BM  '  1611  P^*^^^-  This  is  the  "Authorized  Version  "  of  the  Bible 
which  was  prepared  by  a  number  of  scholars  at  King 
James's  desire  and  published  in  1611,  rapidly  superseding  the 
various  older  versions  upon  which  it  was  based.  It  requires  no 
illustration,  nor  any  comment  beyond  the  simple  statement  that 
there  is  no  English  wTiter  of  importance  from  Milton  and  Bunyan 
to  Macaulay  and  Ruskin  who  does  not  owe  much  of  his  power  to 
the  purity  and  dignified  simplicity  of  this  great  model.  It  is  one 
more  monument,  the  last  we  have  space  for,  of  an  age  which 
built  for  itself  so  many  and  such  splendid  memorials. 


CHAPTER  XI 


CRASHAW 

French  Academy 

HERBICK 

founded,  1635 

COWLEY 

Descartes 

TAYLOR 

Pascal 

BROWNE 

Corneille 

WALTON 

Calderon 

MILTON 

Vandyke 

Rembrandt 

Claude  Lorraine 

Velasquez 

CAROLINE    AND    PURITAN    PERIOD AGE    OF   MILTON 

1625-1660 


First  Puritan  Emigration  to 

America : . . .  16'J0 

Charles  1 1625-1649 

Petition  of  Right 1628 

Laud  Archbishop  of  Canter- 
bury   1633 

Long  Parliament 1640 

Battle  of  Naseby I64,'i 

Commonwealth 1649-1653 

Protectorate 1653-1659 

Death  of  Cromwell 1658 


Though  at  the  death  of  Queen  Elizabeth,  in  1603,  the  throne 
of  England  passed  from  the  Tudors  to  the  House  of  Stuarts,  we 
have  chosen  in  the  preceding  chapters  to  extend  the  term  EHza- 
bethan  to  cover  what  is  sometimes  known  as  the  Jacobean  period, 
or  the  entire  reign  of  James  I.  This  is  because  the  earlier  spirit 
did  not  die  immediately — because  the  high  ideals,  the  vigor  of 
imagination,  and  the  enthusiasm  for  action,  which  Ave  associate 
with  Elizabeth's  reign,  lasted  well  through  the  first  quarter  of 
the  seventeenth  century.  But  so  much  life  and  passion  was 
certain  to  be  followed  by  a  reaction;  when  achievement  lagged, 
as  always,  far  behind  expectation,  men  began  to  lose  their  heart 
for  discovery  and  their  zeal  to  create.  Even  early  in  the  reign 
of  the  Stuarts  may  be  detected  the  beginnings  of  such  a  change; 
and  there  needed  only  the  mistaken  policies  of  that  House, 
working  in  fatal  opposition  to  the  will  of  the  people,  to  complete 
the  decline  of  the  Elizabethan  spirit,  and  establish,  by  the  middle 
t)f  the  century,  a  very  different  one  in  its  stead. 

135 


136  CAROLINE    AND   PURITAN   PERIOD 

The  changes  that  took  place  bore  a  twofold  aspect,  political 
and  religious.  James  I.  proved  to  be  an  arbitrary  and  un- 
wise monarch,  without  Elizabeth's  toleration  and  clear-sight- 
edness, and  by  holding  stubbornly  to  his  theory  of  the  divine 
right  of  kings  he  prepared  the  way  for  one  of  those  popular 
risings  by  which  from  time  to  time  the  English  nation  has  won 
the  freedom  it  now  enjoys.  With  political  tyranny  came  re-- 
ligious  tyranny,  which  grew  especially  severe  in  the  reign  of 
Charles  I.,  who  countenanced  the  notorious  persecutions  of 
Archbishop  Laud.  This  tyranny  bore  hardest  upon  the  Puri- 
tans, or  extreme  Protestants,  who  constituted  then  about  three- 
fourths  of  the  Protestants  of  England,  and  many  of  them  fled 
to  Holland  and  America.  When  finally  the  Civil  War  came, 
resulting  in  the  victory  of  Cromwell's  army,  the  execution  of 
Charles,  and  the  establishment  of  the  Commonwealth,  it  was 
virtually  Puritanism  that  ruled  England. 

Now  the  spirit  of  Puritanism  was  not  the  spirit  of  the 
Ileformation  from  which  it  sj>rang.  The  Reformation  of  a 
century  earlier  had  its  liberal  side;  it  was  one  manifestation  of 
the  broad  Renaissance  movement  for  fret-r  and  fuller  life.  It  was 
this  that  had  put  the  Bible  into  theliands  of  all  the  people,  with 
the  result  sometimes  of  setting  coijs(;ience  at  war  with  the  Church. 
But  the  freedom  that  Puritanism  stood  for  was  freedom  of  con- 
science only,  and  with  the  majority  of  its  adherents,  who  had 
little  culture,  it  worked  in  direct  opposition  to  the  intellectual 
freedom  and  spirit  of  inquiry  which  marked  the  great  minds  of 
Elizabeth's  age.  Moreover,  fixing  its  eyes  steadfastly  upon  the 
future  life,  it  was  dispo.sed  to  ignore  or  rebuke  all  activities  that 
ministered  only  to  the  present.  Thus  it  narrowed  while  it 
ennobled.  Literature,  art,  and  science  suffered;  enthusiasm  for 
creation  was  chilled.  The  theatres,  for  instance,  as  being 
especially  worldly,  were  given  over  to  the  more  dissolute  and 
frivolous  classes,  and  when  as  a  consequence  the  drama  finally 
degenerated  into  mere  horror  and  indecency,  they  were  wholly 
suppressed.     It  was  but  natural  that  the  literature  of  the  period 


DONNE  137 

should  be  for  the  most  part  either  weakly  imitative  of  the  great- 
ness that  was  past,  or  if  strong  in  the  element  of  religious  fervor, 
too  little  likely  to  be  supported  by  a  free  and  vigorous  art. 

Of  the  drama,  there  is  practically  nothing  to  be  said;  there 
was,  properly  speaking,  no  Caroline  drama.  Although  at  the 
accession  of  Charles,  in  1625,  many  of  the  Elizabethans  were 
still  producing  plays,  the  best  work  was  nearly  all  done;  only 
Jonson,  indeed,  of  the  writers  of  the  first  class  survived  that 
date,  and  none  of  importance  arose  after  it.  And  of  course 
there  was  no  Puritan  drama;  when  the  theatres  were  closed  in 
1642,  the  occupation  of  the  playwright  was  gone.  But  the 
drama,  in  passing,  gave  place  to  an  abundant  outflow  of  lyric 
poetry,  and  this,  though  intrinsically  inferior  to  the  Elizabethan 
lyric  poetry,  demands  some  account;  there  was,  moreover,  some 
very  important  prose  in  this  period;  and  there  was  the  great 
Puritan  writer  of  both  poetry  and  prose,  John  Milton.  We 
shall  begin  with  the  lyric  poetry. 

The  term  "metaphysical,"  borrowed  from  Dryden  and  ap- 
plied by  Doctor  Johnson  to  certain  minor  poets  of  this  period, 
expresses  one  of  their  characteristics.  They  showed  a  strong 
tendency  to  get  "beyond  nature,"  as  it  were, — to  wander  from 
the  simple  and  sensuous  matter  of  poetry  into  regions  of  subtle, 
speculative  philosophy;  so  that  to  think  and  to  elaborate  their 
thought  was  for  them  more  important  than  to  see  and  to  feel. 
But  another  term,  which  Milton  applied  to  them,  is  still  more 
distinctive:  he  called  them  "fantastic."  The  peculiarity  which 
is  thus  described  goes  back  to  Elizabeth's  day.  We  remember 
what  Euphuism  was  in  prose.  Somewhat  similarly  there  had 
arisen  a  false  taste  in  poetry,  a  fondness  for  distorting  the  simplest 
ideas  and  overlaying  them  with  fantastic  images  and  phrases. 
"Conceits"  these  ornaments  were  called.  An  example  is  the 
passage  in  Chapman's  Homer  in  which  Hector  is  made  to  say 
that  Troy  "shall  shed  her  towers  for  tears  of  overthrow."  John 
Donne,  who  v/as  a  preacher  in  the  reign  of  James  I.,  and  whose 
life  spans  the  period  from  Elizabethan  to  Caroline  times,  was  a 


138  CAROLINE  AND  PURITAN   PERIOD 

poet  of  really  great  gifts  spoiled  by  metaphysical  pedantry  and 
conceits.     If,  indeed,  Donne  might  be  allowed  to  stand  as  high 
as  his  highest  verse,  as  high  even   as  so  direct  and 
^  arresting  a  quatrain  as  this, — 

1673-1631.  "I  have  done  one  braver  thing 

Than  all  the  Worthies  did! 
And  yet  a  braver  thence  doth  spring; 
Which  is,  To  keep  that  hid!" — 

we  could  scarcely  call  him  a  minor  poet.  In  the  treatment  of 
his  favorite  themes  of  Love  and  Death,  he  has  moments  of  rapt 
vision  and  of  melancholy  passion  and  power  that  place  him 
almost  among  the  great  names.  But  he  is  continually  wandering 
off  into  such  dark  realms  of  involved  fancy  that  it  is  next  to  im- 
possible to  track  him.  Beyond  question  hcAvasthe  king  of  the 
"metaphysicians."  He  belonged  most  properly  to  the  later 
Elizabethan  or  Jacobean  period;  he  was  writing  even  before 
the  close  of  the  sixteenth  century,  and  his  various  songs,  sonnets, 
elegies,  divine  poems,  etc.,  seem  to  have  been  pretty  generally 
known.  But  they  were  not  published  until  1633,  after  his 
death,  and  it  was  then  that  the  influence  of  his  weaker  traits 
became  most  conspicuous,  leaving  a  deep  mark  upon  the  poetry 
of  his  immediate  successors.* 

We  may  divide  the  Caroline  school  proper  into  several 
groups.  One  group,  sometimes  referred  to  as  the  "Sacred 
Poets,"  consists  of  Herbert,  Crashaw,  Vaughan,  and  others. 
Of  these,  Herbert  is  the  most  distinctly  sacred,  and  has 
always  been  the  most  widely  read.     But  for  fluent  verse  and 

*  Donne  is  the  author  of  the  famous  and  reaUv  fine  conceit  of  two  lovers 
souls: 

"If  they  be  two,  they  are  two  so 

As  stiff  twin  compasses  are  two : 

Thy  soul,  the  flx'd  foot,  makes  no  show 

To  move,  but  doth,  if  th'  other  do. 

'•And  though  it  in  the  centre  sit, 

Yet  when  the  other  far  doth  roam. 
It  leans  and  hearkens  after  it, 

And  grows  erect  as  that  comes  home." 

The  Italian  i)oet,  Marini  (1569-1625).  was  also  a  conspicuous  influence  at 
this  time,  and  "Marlnism"  is  another  word  for  strained  metaphors  and 
conceits. 


crashaw  139 

flashes  of  real  poetic  fire,  Crashaw  takes  a  higher  place.     He 
is,  at  the  same  time,  the  best  Caroline  exponent  of   the   ten- 
dencies   described    above.     He    was    a    Protestant 

„      ,.  clerjjynian's  son  who  in  later  life  became  a  Roman 

Caroline         ^  i  •     t     i  p    i       /^i        i 

"Sacred        Catholic,  and  died  in  Italy,  a  canon  of  that  Church. 

Poets."         In  1646  was  published    his  Steps  to  the  Temple,  a 

Richard         volume   inspired   by  Herbert's   The   Temple.     The 

Crashaw,      same  volume  contained  also  some  secular  pieces,  or 

76'  1  'i  9— 

lew  "Delights  of  the  Muses,"  among   which    is  to  be 

found  his  best   known   poem, — Wishes,  he  calls  it, 
"to  his  supposed  mistress," 

' '  Whoe'er  she  be, 
That  not  impossible  she 
That  shall  command  my  heart  and  me. " — 

"Eyes,  that  displace 
The  neighbor  diamond,  and  out-face 
That  sunshine,  by  their  own  sweet  grace. 

"Tresses,  that  wear 
Jewels,  but  to  declare 
How  much  themselves  more  precious  are .... 

"Life,  that  dares  send 
A  challenge  to  his  end, 
And  when  it  comes  say.  Welcome  friend  I .... 

"I  wish  her  store 
Of  worth  may  leave  her  poor 
Of  wishes;  and  I  wish no  more." 

Here  is  evidence  that  fantasticality  may  pass,  as  in  the  fourth 
stanza,  into  the  noblest  of  poetry,  and  that  ingenuity  and  sin- 
cerity, as  in  the  last,  may  sometimes  meet. 

The  group  to  whom  the  name  "Caroline"  has  been  most 
specifically  attached  were  writers  in  a  much  lighter  vein:  Her- 
rick,  Carew,  Suckling,  Lovelace,  etc.  They  have  sometimes 
been  compared  to  Nero  fiddling  on  the  walls  of  burning  Rome, 
so  morally  irresponsible  do  they  seem,  and  so  indifferent,  in 
their   verse    at  least,  to  Dissolutions   of   Parliament  and    Star 


140  CAROLINE  AND  PURITAN   PERIOD 

Chambers  and  all  the  terrible  political  and  religious  conflict 
impending.  They  found  their  themes  for  the  most  part  in 
amatory  praises  of  their  mistress's  cheeks,  envy  of 
her  girdle,  or  complaints  of  her  inconstancy,  pur- 
\morlsts  suing  each  Idea  with  endless  conceits,  happy  and 
Jinbert  ridiculous.     To  Suckling  {Ballad  upon  a   Weddimj) 

Herrkk,        belongs  the  fancy  that, 

ir,9l-lG74.  „^,     ,    ^  ^        ,,  ,  ,^.      ^ 

'Her  feet  beneath  her  petticoat 

Like  little  mice  stole  in  and  out." 

Lovelace  can  elaborate  such  a  conceit  as  that  his  Ellinda's 
glove  is  a  snowy  farm  with  five  tenements,  yet  in  a  moment  of 
genuine  inspiration  {Going  to  the  Wars)  writes: 

"I  could  not  love  thee,  dear,  so  much. 
Loved  I  not  honor  more." 

But  Robert  Herrick  was  the  real  prince  of  this  cavalier  tribe. 
His  bachelor  life  was  long,  extending  from  the  time  of  Shake- 
speare's earliest  writings  to  the  date  of  ^Milton's  death,  and  was 
spent  alternately  in  a  Devonshire  vicarage  and  the  social  world 
of  London.  His  single  volume,  Hesperides  (including  a  few 
religious  poems,  or  "Noble  Numbers"),  was  published  in  1048, 
the  year  before  the  execution  of  Charles.  As  a  volume,  it  is  a 
threadless  labyrinth,  a  confused  collection  of  trifles,  hundreds 
of  them  only  two  lines  long,  the  longest  little  more  than  a  hun- 
dred, couplets,  epigrams,  and  odes,  to  and  upon  all  sorts  of 
things — To  Julia,  To  Bacchus,  To  Violets,  To  Fortune,  Upon 
Love,  Upon  a  Fly,  Upon  a  Child,  Upon  many  and  many  a  Maid. 

"Cherry-ripe,  ripe,  ripe,  I  cry. 
Full  and  fair  ones;  come  and  buy. 
If  so  be  you  ask  me  where 
They  do  grow?     I  answer,  There, 
Where  my  Julia's  lips  do  smile, 
There's  the  land,  or  cherry-isle. 
Whose  plantations  fully  show 
All  the  year  where  cherries  grow." 

Just  what  it  is  that  sets    Herrick's  verse  apart  from  others', 


'  COWLEY  141 

making  it,  and  leaving  it  still,  the  most  charming  light  verse  in 
the  language,  is  not  easy  to  say.  Perhaps  it  is  the  careless 
rapture  of  a  not  too  conscious  and  curious  joy  of  life.  The 
Elizabethan  intensity  has  given  way  to  something  lower,  but 
mostly  gayer  and  occasionally  even  sweeter.  A  pastoral  sim- 
plicity pervades  it,  with  only  a  touch,  in  the  background,  of 
sadness, — of  the  spirit  of 

"  Gather  ye  rose-buds  while  ye  may, 
Old  time  is  still  a-flying." 

Somewhat  by  himself,  confusing  all  schools,  combining 
traits  of  the  Elizabethan,  Caroline,  and    Restoration    periods, 

stands  Abraham  Cowley,  in  his  own  day  a  writer 
Abraham  j^^jj  -j^  higher  estimation  than  Milton.  A  royalist 
^^^c  ily^'y     like  most  of  the  poets  we  have  mentioned,  he  suffered 

virtual  banishment  during  the  Commonwealth.  His 
celebrated  volume.  The  Mistress  (1647),  was  a  collection  of  love 
poems  that  are  now  celebrated  only  for  their  pedantic  conceits 
and  astonishing  absence  of  anything  like  the  warmth  of  real  love. 
Nobody  professes  to  read  them  for  pleasure.  Cowley  however 
is  remembered  for  two  things.  Following  the  example  of  the 
minor  poets.  Waller  and  Denham,  he  used  the  old  English 
couplet  of  Chaucer  and  Marlowe  in  an  altered  form,  making  it 
perfectly  balanced  and  integrally  complete,  and  leaving  it  so 
popular  that  for  more  than  a  century  it  was  almost  to  crowd 
out  other  verse  forms.  The  following  lines  from  a  poem  on  the 
death  of  Crashaw  will  illustrate: 

"  Hail,  bard  triumphant!  and  some  care  bestow 
On  us,  the  poets  militant  below!  .  . 
Thou  from  low  earth  in  nobler  flames  didst  rise, 
And  like  Elijah,  mount  alive  the  skies. ' ' 

In  the  second  place,  in  his  so-called  Pindarics,  he  set  a  fashion 
of  writing  odes  in  irregular  lines  and  stanzas,  which  in  the  hand.'^ 
of  Dryden,  Wordsworth,  and  Tennys®n  was  destined  to  bring 
forth  sf)me  veiy  great  poems.  He  wrote  also  some  essavs  in 
late  life,  in  a  prose  that  is  distinctly  modern  and  readable. 


142  CAROLINE   AND   PURITAN  PERIOD 

The  prose  writers  of  the  period,  as  we  view  them  now, 
were  on  the  whole  men  of  a  larger  mold.     Their  subjects  were 

not  often  of  such  universal  interest  as  Bacon's,  they 
Caroline  showed  that  tiiey  were  still  wi'estling  with  a  medium 
Prose.  of  expression  that  had  not  been  subdued  to  perfect 

clearness  and  coherence,  and  they  had  their  own 
foibles  and  conceits.  They  were  prone  to  follow  Burton's 
method  of  indiscriminate  quotation,  or  resort  to  quips  and 
trivial  witticisms.  Thomas  Fuller,  for  instance,  whom  Lamb 
admired,  has  a  reputation  that  depends  almost  wholly  on  his 
"quaintness."  But  into  this  category  we  cannot  bring  such 
men  as  Thomas  Hobbes,  the  philosopher.  Clarendon,  the  ever 
admirable  historian  of  the  Great  Rebellion,  nor  the  more  dis- 
tinctly literary  writers,  Jeremy  Taylor,  Sir  Thomas  Browne, 
and  Izaak  Walton. 

Jeremy  Taylor  was  a  student  at  Cambridge  at  the  same 
time  as  Milton,  though  in  a  different  college.     He  took  orders, 

and  early  attracted  the  attention  of  Archbishop 
Jeremy  Laud  by  his  preaching;  seems  to  have  been  a  chap- 

Taijlor,         lain  in  the  king's  army;  was  forced  into  retirement 
ltilS-1667.    in  Wales  during  the  Conmionwealth,  and  several 

times  suffered  imprisonment;  and  after  the  Restora- 
tion was  made  a  bishop  in  Ireland,  where  he  died.  Taylor's 
reputation,  aside  from  that  which  attached  to  his  extraordinary 
eloquence  as  a  preacher,  rests  upon  two  books.  Holy  Living 
and  Holy  Dying  (1050,  1051).  The  first  is  a  practical  manual 
of  religious  life.  The  second  is  a  discourse  on  death,  adorned 
with  all  the  resources  of  his  decidedly  florid  rhetoric,  and  made 
impressive  with  the  rush  and  rhythm  of  his  sentences.  It  is 
the  most  "poetical"  prose  (to  use  that  word  in  a  sense  not  en- 
tirely creditable  to  either  prose  or  poetry)  before  the  age  of  Burke. 

"Reckon  but  from  the  sprightfulness  of  youth  and  the  fair  cheeks 
and  full  eyes  of  childhood  ...  to  the  loathsomeness  and  horror 
of  a  thre<!  days'  burial,  and  wo  shall  perceive  the  distance  to  be  A'cry 
great  and  very  strange.     But  so  have  I  seen  a  rose  newly  springing 


BROWNE  143 

from  the  clefts  of  its  hood,  and,  at  first,  it  was  fair  as  the  morning,  and 
full  with  tiie  dew  of  heaven,  as  a  lamb's  fleece;  but  when  a  ruder 
breath  had  forced  open  its  virgin  modesty,  and  dismantled  its  too 
youthful  and  unripe  retirements,  it  began  to  put  on  darkness,  and  to 
decline  to  softness  and  the  symptoms  of  a  sickly  age;  it  bowed  the 
head  and  broke  its  stalk,  and  at  night,  having  lost  some  of  its  leave?; 
and  all  its  beauty,  it  fell  into  the  portion  of  weeds  and  outworn  faces." 

Thomas  Browne,  knighted  by  Charles  II.,  was  an  Oxford 
man  who  studied  medicine,  and  after  a  period  of  travel  passed 

a  quiet  life  in  the  desultory  practice  of  his  profes- 
6/r  Tfwmas  gj^^^  ^^  Norwich.  Except  perhaps  for  the  Religio 
irn'-  /«>?«'     ^l^^^ci,  which  was  first  printed  without  his  knowledge 

in  1642,  his  writings  reflect  neither  the  temper  noi 
the  outward  turmoil  of  the  times.  Even  that  book,  which  con- 
tains the  mystic  meditations  of  a  mind  both  sceptical  and  relig- 
ious, might  have  been  written  in  any  age.  Students  of  literature, 
however,  will  turn  more  naturally  to  his  Urn-Burial,  1658,  a 
book  w'hich  was  inspired  by  the  discovery  of  some  ancient  burial 
urns  in  Norfolk.  The  liistorical  portion  of  the  book  is  only  an 
excuse  for  the  meditative,  and  the  real  theme  of  it  is  "Vanity 
of  vanities."  In  its  five  chapters  are  compressed  some  of  the 
most  searching  thought  and  most  wonderful  prose  in  any  lan- 
guage. It  is  not  for  the  tyro;  the  compression,  the  subtlety, 
the  strange  I^atin  vocabulary,  the  sentences  that  seem  to  bend 
under  their  own  weight,  do  not  make  easy  reading.  But  for  the 
cultivated  literary  palate,  however  jaded  by  cheaper  stimulants, 
or  by  familiarity  grown  indifferent  to  things  of  finest  taste,  there 
is  still  stimulus  here;  and  while  the  prose  would  never,  like 
Taylor's,  be  called  poetical,  to  the  delicately  attuned  ear  the 
march  of  these  closely  marshalled  clauses  will  yield  a  keener 
delight  than  any  poetry  beneath  Shakespeare  and  Milton. 

"Pyramids,  arches,  obelisks,  were  but  the  irregularities  of  vain- 
glory, and  ^^•ild  enormities  of  ancient  magnanimitj'.  .  .  To  subsist 
in  lasting  monuments,  to  live  in  their  productions,  to  exist  in  tlieir 
names  and  predicament  of  chima^ras,  was  large  satisfaction  unto  old 
expectations,  and  made  one  part  of  their  Elysiums.     But  all  this  is 


144  CAROLINE   AXD   PURITAX   PERIOD 

nothing  in  tlie  metaphysics  of  true  beUef.  To  live  indeed,  is  to  be 
again  ourselves,  which  being  not  only  an  hope,  but  an  evidence  in 
noble  believers,  'tis  all  one  to  lie  in  St.  Innocents'  churchyard,  as  in 
the  sands  of  Egypt.  Ready  to  be  anything,  in  the  ecstasy  of  being 
ever,  and  as  content  with  six  foot  as  the  moles  of  Adrianus." 

Izaak  Walton  is  one  of  not  a  few  instances  in  literature,  of  a 
man,  without  special  scholarship  or  literary  training,  writing  a 

book  that  becomes  a  classic,  beloved  of  all  readers. 
Izaak  ^^  ^^'^^  ^  liondon  shopkeeper,  devoted,  through  all 

Walton,  the  turbulence  of  the  times,  to  tranquillity  and  the 
1593-1683.    cultivation  of  good  friends  and  good  books.     His 

writing  was  done  in  what  would  have  been  late  life 
to  a  shorter-lived  man.  He  published  The  Complete  Angler 
at  the  age  of  sixty,  in  the  year  when  Cromwell  assumed  the 
protectorate  (1653).  Besides  this  he  wrote,  over  a  period  of 
forty  years,  five  brief  Lives — of  Donne,  Hooker,  Herbert,  etc. — 
which  are  among  the  first  real  biographies  in  our  literature. 
But  the  very  pleasant,  and  also  practical,  treatise  on  angling 
is  his  great  book.  It  is  cast  in  the  form  of  a  conversation,  in 
the  simplest  .style,  with  a  background  of  clear  streams  and 
honeysuckle  hedges  delicately  touched  in,  and  breathes  every- 
where the  meek  spirit  of  the  man  who  asked  no  better  gifts  of 
Heaven  than  "flowers,  and  showers,  and  njeat,  and  content, 
and  leisure  to  go  a-fishing." 

"And,  let  me  tell  you,  this  kind  of  fishing  with  a  dead  rod,  and 
laying  night-hooks,  are  like  putting  money  to  use;  for  they  both  work 
for  the  owners  when  they  do  nothing  but  sleep,  or  eat,  or  rejoice,  as 
you  know  we  have  done  this  last  hour,  and  sat  as  quietly  and  as  free 
from  cares  under  this  sycamore,  as  Virgil's  Tityrus  and  his  MelibcEUS 
did  under  their  broad  beech-tree.  No  life,  my  honest  scholar,  no  life 
so  happy  and  so  pleasant  as  the  life  of  a  well-governed  angler;  for  when 
the  lawyer  is  swallowed  up  with  business,  and  the  statesman  is  pre- 
venting or  contriving  plots,  then  we  sit  on  cowslip-banks,  hearing  the 
birds  sing,  and  possess  ourselves  in  as  much  quietness  as  these  silent 
silver  streams,  which  we  now  see  glide  so  quietly  by  us." 

For  the  Puritan  side  of  this  divided  age,  the  name  of  John 
Milton  stands,   in  literature,  almost  alone;  Marv-ell,   Milton's 


:r>s^^^^^ 


IZAAK    >VaI.TON 

Robert  Herrick 


John  Bunyax 
•tohn  mil.tox 


MILTOX  ]45 

friend,  once  regarded  as  a  very  great  poet,  is  so  regarded  no 
longer,  and  Bunyan  belongs  to  another  generation.     Milton  was 
bom  in  Bread  Street,  London,  in  the  year  1608.     He 
John  came,  he  tells  us,  "of  an  honest  (i.  e.,  honorable)  fam- 

Y^^o  y1.-v/     ilv;"  his  father  was  a  scrivener.    His  university  educa- 

Ih08—lb74-         '  .  /-I       •      J      y~i  r-i  ' 

tion  was  obtained  at  Christ  s  College,  Cambridge, 
where  he  became  M.  A.  in  his  twenty-fourth  year.  The  six 
years  following  he  spent  at  his  father's  country  place  in  Buck- 
inghamshire, pursuing  his  favorite  classical,  mathematical,  and 
musical  studies.  In  1638  he  set  out  for  two  years  of  foreign 
travel,  passing  through  Paris  and  Nice  to  Genoa,  Pisa,  Florence, 
Rome,  and  Naples,  making  by  the  way  friends  of  various  cele- 
brated men.     The  remainder  of  his  life  was  passed  in  London. 

He  was  a  Puritan,  like  his  father,  and  a  republican  of  an 
unbendingly  stern  moral  temper  softened  only  by  his  literary 
and  artistic  tastes.  He  wrote  constantly  in  behalf  of  the  Puritan 
cause;  he  defended  the  execution  of  Charles;  he  was  Latin  Secre- 
tary under  the  Commonwealth  and  under  Cromwell,  engaged 
in  carrj'ing  on  diplomatic  correspondence.  Thus  the  middle 
portion  of  his  active  life  was  spent  in  the  service  of  the  state, 
and,  as  we  shall  see,  not  without  lasting  results  in  the  service  of 
universal  freedom.  The  Restoration  naturally  forced  him  into 
retirement,  but  fortunately  left  him  unmolested  for  the  still 
higher  service  of  the  Heavenly  Muse.  The  other  events  of  main 
importance  in  the  chronicle  of  his  life  are  his  three  marriages, 
one  before  and  two  after  his  blindness,  and  the  blindness  itself, 
which,  brought  on  by  arduous  midnight  studies  pursued  "from 
twelve  years  of  age,"  overtook  him  in  the  year  1652. 

The  periods  of  Milton's  literary  work  are  pretty  sharply 
definable.  There  were  an  early  and  a  late  period  of  poetry,  and 
between  them  a  period  of  political  and  polemic  prose. 
His  Prose.  It  will  be  as  well  to  consider  this  middle  period  first, 
since  it  had  not  so  much  his  love  as  the  mere  devo- 
tion of  a  mind  steadfast  to  its  principles.  He  had  cut  short  his 
travels  in  1639,  denying  himself  a  visit  to  Greece,  because,  he 


146  CAROLINE    AM)    PUUITAX    PERIOD 

says,  "1  thought  it  base  to  be  travclhng  for.  amusement  abroad 
while  my  fellow-citizens  were  fighting  for  liberty  at  home." 
His  own  best  fighting  was  done  in  the  scholar's  way,  with  the 
pen,  and  the  twenty  years  between  1041  and  1660  brought 
forth  various  tracts,  both  in  English  and  in  Latin,  on  reforma- 
tion, prelacy,  divorce,  etc.  The  interest  of  their  matter  is 
chiefly  historical,  and  the  manner  is  often  so  bitterly  contro- 
versial, not  to  say  scurrilous,  that  we  might  well  wish  to  pass 
them  by.  But  something  in  the  manner  challenges  regard, 
and  besides,  there  are  two,  the  Trad  on  Education  and  the 
Areopagitica  (both  1644)  which  neither  matter  nor  manner 
permits  us  to  ignore.  The  former,  though  professing  to  be 
only  a  hasty  and  unstudied  letter,  sets  forth  with  rare  discern- 
ment a  kind  of  ideal  curriculum  for  the  education  of  youth.  As 
the  full  scope  of  it,  from  grammar  and  arithmetic  to  architecture, 
navigation,  fencing,  and  singing,  gradually  breaks  on  the  reader's 
view  and  he  realizes  in  all  its  hasty  presentation  that  this  is  indeed 
"not  a  bow  for  every  man  to  shoot  in  that  counts  himself  a 
teacher,"  he  begins  to  feel  a^  hat  John  Fiske  calls  the  cosmic  vast- 
ness  of  Milton — the  sense,  in  dealing  with  him,  of  "a  world  on 
our  hands."  The  Areopagitica  is  the  famous  plea  for  unlicensed 
printing,  the  noblest  and  perhaps  the  most  powerful  document  on 
the  freedom  of  the  press  ever  penned.  Lovers  of  liberty  have 
long  been  wont  to  stamp  upon  their  memory  its  best  passages. 

"For  books  are  not  absolutely  dead  things,  but  do  contain  a  po- 
tency of  life  in  them  to  be  as  active  as  that  soul  was  whose  progeny 
they  are;  nay,  they  do  preserve  as  in  a  vial  the  purest  efficacy  and  ex- 
traction of  that  living  intellect  that  bred  them.  I  know  they  are  as 
lively,  and  as  vigorously  productive,  as  those  fabulous  dragon's  teeth; 
and  being  sown  up  and  down,  may  chance  to  spring  up  armed  men. 
And  yet,  on  the  other  hand,  unless  wariness  be  used,  as  good  almost 
kill  a  man  as  kill  a  good  book :  who  kills  a  man  kills  a  reasonable  crea- 
ture, God's  image;  but  he  who  destroys  a  good  book,  kills  reaso  -  tself, 
kills  the  image  of  God,  as  it  were  in  the  eye.  Many  a  man  lives  a  bur- 
den to  the  earth ;  but  a  good  book  is  the  precious  life-blood  of  a  master 
spirit,  embalmed  and  treasured  up  on  purpose  to  a  life  beyond  life." 

The  "something  in  the  manner"  of  all  this  prose  is  simply 


MILTON  147 

the  impress  of  Milton's  character.  The  prose  itself  is  no  better 
formed  than  most  English  prose  had  been  for  a  century,  and  that 
is  not  saying  much.  It  is  not  so  well  formed  as  Bacon's.  Milton 
acknowledged  that  he  had  in  it  but  the  use,  as  it  were,  of  his 
"left  hand."  His  English  structure  is  not  freed  from  the  bond- 
age of  Latin  involution.  "And  me  perhaps  each  of  these 
dispositions  may  have  at  other  times  seriously  affected"  he  will 
write,  as  if  he  were  writing  Latin,  or  poetry.  In  his  flights  of 
eloquence,  moreover,  he  is  never  secure  from  fall.  It  is  clear 
that  he  does  not  care  enough  about  the  form  to  study  his  harmon- 
ies. But  the  passion  of  his  purpose  shines  everywhere  through, 
and  while  the  rhythm  and  even  the  imaginative  beauty  of  his 
best  passages  may  perhaps  be  paralleled,  the  torrential  eloquence 
of  them  cannot,  simply  because  the  vehement  spirit  of  Milton  is 
without  parallel  among  the  writers  of  our  prose.  Thus  he  stands, 
with  Taylor  and  Browne,  the  third,  and  certainly  not  the  least,  in 
the  great  triumvirate  of  Caroline  prose  eloquence. 

It  was  poetry,  however,  to  which  Milton  felt  that  he  was 
especially  "led  by  the  genial  power  of  nature,"and  he  had  begun 
to  WTite  it  in  his  early  Cambridge  days.  The  h^mn 
p    .  On  the  Morning  of  Christ's  Nativity  was  composed 

in  his  twenty-first  year.  But  the  period  most  fruitful 
of  lyric  poetry  was  the  time  of  his  retirement  in  the  country. 
Even  if  L' Allegro  and  //  Penseroso  were  written  earlier,  which  is 
not  probable  (the  date  assigned  is  1632),  Comus  and  Lycidas 
date  certainly  from  1634  and  1637.*  To  these,  to  complete 
the  list  of  Milton's  important  minor  poems,  should  be  added 
the  Sonnets,  most  of  which  Avere  composed  in  the  middle  or 
prose  period  of  his  life,  and  the  stern  scriptural  drama  of  Sam- 
son Agonistes  (1671),  which,  with  the  great  epics,  was  the  product 
of  his  latter  years,  and  in  spirit  is  much  more  akin  to  those  epics 
than  to  the  spontaneity  and  exuberance  of  his  early  work. 

As  their  Italian  titles  indicate,  L' Allegro  and  II  Penseroso 

♦  Comus  was  published  in  1637,  Lycidas  In  1638.    There  was  a  collective 
edition  of  the  minor  poems  iu  1645. 


148  CAROLINE  AND  PURITAN  PERIOD 

set  forth  the  moods  respectively  of  a  man  giving  himself  over  to 
"  heart-easing  Mirth,"  and  of  one  devoting  himself  to  the  soberer 
delights  of  meditation— to  "divinest  Melancholy."  They  are 
written  in  an  appropriate  verse, — for  the  most  part  in  the  free 
octosyllabic,  or  rather  four-stress,  couplet,  the  lines  of  which  are 
satisfied  as  often  with  seven  syllables  as  with  eight;  and  they  are 
throughout  remarkable  alike  for  their  sustained  lyric  grace  and 
for  the  almost  bewildering  succession  of  phrases  and  images  that 
at  once  convey  and  adorn  the  central  theme.  So  perfect,  indeed, 
are  these  latter  that  they  have  nearly  all  strayed  outside  of  the 
poems  and  familiarized  themselves  to  our  ears  from  a  thousand 
extraneous  sources,  until  such  phrases  as  "soft  Lydian  airs,"  or 
"the  tale  of  Troy  divine,"  or  "the  studious  cloister's  pale"  have 
become  a  part  of  our  common  stock. 

Camus  is  a  poem  of  rather  more  substance,  being  a  masque 
composed  in  honor  of  the  Earl  of  Bridgewater,  and  presented  by 
the  children  of  the  Earl  when  he  entered  upon  the  Presidency  of 
Wales.  It  is  the  story  of  a  maiden  lost  in  a  forest  and  captured 
by  Comus,  a  base  magician,  who  tries  to  transform  her  into  a 
monster  like  those  which  make  up  his  own  brutish  rout,  but 
whose  enchantments  she  overcomes  by  her  native  purity.  The 
poem  belongs,  in  fact,  with  the  half  masques,  half  lyrical  dramas, 
of  Jonson  and  Fletcher,  and  owes  something  in  particular  to  the 
latter's  Faithful  Shepherdess.  But  no  masque  before  it  ever  had 
quite  such  a  poet  to  help  out  with  quite  such  poetry  the  music  and 
dancing.  On  its  sensuous  side,  it  is  a  thing  of  air  and  light,  of 
color  and  odor,  lulling  the  spirit  into  soft  accord  with  "jocund 
Spring"  and  "the  rosy-bosomed  Hours."  Yet  "divine  phil- 
osophy" is  not  forgotten.  The  Lady  Avho  resists  the  enticements 
of  Comus  and  his  crew  is  the  t}'pe  of  that  virtue  that  can 

"see  to  do  what  virtue  would 
By  her  own  radiant  light,  though  .sun  and  moon 
Were  in  the  flat  sea  sunk." 

If  the  ])oeni  have  a  serious  fault,  it  lies  in  the  enforcement  of 
its  moral  beyond  the  proper  function  of  a  masque. 


MILTON  149 

Lycidas  is  the  first,  and  perhaps  still  the  foremost,  of  the 
three  or  four  great  elegies,  including  Shelley's  Adonais  and 
Tennyson's  In  Memoriam,  which  enrich  our  literature.  Ed- 
ward King,  a  fellow-student  of  jVIilton's,  was  drowned  at  sea, 
and  a  memorial  volume  was  prepared  by  his  friends.  Lycidas 
was  the  concluding  piece  in  this  tribute.  The  pastoral  imagery 
employed  in  it  can  not  be  held  to  detract  from  its  sincerity  any 
more  than  metre  and  rhyme  themselves,  while  to  those  who 
are  familiar  with  the  classical  convention  it  is  a  genuine  source 
of  charm.  No  piping  poet-shepherds  since  Theocritus  have 
"touched  the  tender  stops  of  various  quills"  to  sweeter  notes 
or  more  haunting  cadences.  There  is  only  the  corrupt  herd- 
men's  grating  on  "scrannel  pipes  of  wretched  straw"  for  discord, 
a  prelude  of  the  discord  soon  to  become  so  harsh  in  English 
Church  and  State  and  in  ■Milton's  life.  For  the  poem,  it  should 
be  added,  departs  from  its  primary  elegiac  purpose,  and  under 
the  symbolism  of  the  shepherds  and  their  flocks  Milton  took 
occasion  to  denounce  in  no  measured  terms  the  flagrant  cor- 
ruption of  the  clergy. 

The  scant  score  of  his  Sonnets  were  written  for  the  most  part 
as  they  were  called  forth  by  incidents  in  the  poet's  life,  cele- 
brating here  a  friendship,  lifting  there  a  voice  in  appeal  or 
protest  on  public  affairs.  In  the  sonnet  To  the  Nightingale, 
for  instance,  it  is  the  youthful  poet  that  speaks;  in  those  To 
Cromwell  and  On  the  Late  Massacre  in  Piedmont,  the  religious 
enthusiast;  in  that  On  his  Blindness,  the  poet  again,  bowing 
beneath  afflictions  from  within  and  ^vithout.  They  are  uneven 
in  merit;  Doctor  Johnson  and  his  century  made  light  of  them; 
but  the  best  are  so  filled  with  the  majesty  of  Milton,  that 
Wordsworth's  verdict — "Soul-animating  strains — alas,  too 
few!" — will  henceforth  surely  stand. 

"When  I  consider  how  my  light  is  spent 

Ere  half  my  days,  in  this  dark  world  and  wide, 
And  that  one  talent  which  is  death  to  hide 
Lodged  with  mo  useless,  though  my  soul  more  bent 


150  CAROLINE  AND  PURITAN  PERIOD 

To  serve  therewith  my  Maker,  and  present 
My  true  account,  lest  he  returning  chide; 
'Doth  God  exact  day-labor,  liglit  denied?' 
I  fondly  ask.     But  Patience,  to  prevent 

That  muiTiiur,  soon  replies,  'God  doth  not  need 

Either  man's  work  or  his  own  gifts.     Who  best 
Bear  his  mild  yoke,  they  serve  him  best.     His  state 

Is  kingly:  thousands  at  his  bidding  speed. 

And  post  o'er  land  and  ocean  without  rest; 
They  also  serve  who  only  stand  and  wait.'  " 

(On  Ills  Blindness.) 

That  Milton'.s  lyric  poetry  marks  any  advance  upon  the 
Elizabethan  it  would  not  do  to  say.  It  is  enough  if  Milton  some- 
times reached  the  high  level  of  Spenser  and  Shakespeare  in  what 
was  the  supreme  excellence  of  the  one,  and  one  of  the  supreme 
excellences  of  the  other.  jNIorcover,  his  note  was  his  own,  and 
he  is  second  only  to  Spenser  in  his  influence  upon  the  lyric  poets 
that  have  followed.  There  are  few  traces  of  the  vices  of  his  age — 
here  and  there  a  conceit,  it  may  be,  a  little  exuberance,  a  little 
over-classicism.  But  he  eschews  trivialities  and  subtleties,  and 
though  often  sensuous  in  the  extreme,  as  enamored  of  beauty 
as  any  child  of  the  Renaissance,  he  is  never  in  a  single  word 
.sensual  or  indelicate.  He  rises  clear  in  his  Puritan  robes  above 
both  the  religious  mystics  and  the  courtly  amorists  of  a  much 
divided  and  troubled  age. 

Leaving  now  this  lyric  verse,  we  come  to  the  great  epic 

with  which  Milton  crowned  his  life  and  work.     Paradise  Lost 

is  the  product  of  his  third  period.  The  date  of  its 
"Paradise  .       .  . 

I    t  "  1667  publication,  1607,  puts  it  after  the  Restoration,  but 

there  is  no  real  reason  for  classing  it  with  Restoration 
literature.  Even  before  his  enforced  retirement,  ^Milton's  blind- 
ness had  practically  put  an  end  to  all  intellectual  progress  save 
in  the  wisdom  that  matures  by  meditation.  He  turned  then 
instinctively  to  the  passion  of  his  youth,  becoming  once  more  a 
poet,  sobered  indeed  by  the  years  of  civil  and  religious  strife,  but 
suffering  no  abatement  of  zeal.     His  love  of  beauty  that  had 


MILTON  151 

borne  flower  in  ode  and  masque  now  gave  place  to  a  passion  for 
something  higher  and  holier,  and  he  sought  a  theme  commensu- 
rate with  his  ripened  powers.  As  early  as  the  time  of  his  Italian 
travels  he  had  contemplated  writing  an  epic  of  King  Arthur.  But 
more  and  more  he  was  drawn  to  sacred  subjects  and  finally  fixed 
upon  the  Fall  of  Man.  The  actual  composition  of  the  poem 
seems  to  have  begun  about  1658,  and  tradition  has  fondly  pic- 
tured the  sightless  poet  dictating  the  successive  portions  to  his 
daughters.  Though  still  young  for  such  service,  it  is  not  impos- 
sible that  they  gave  some  of  the  assistance,  both  in  reading  and 
writing,  which  was  constantly  required.  The  first  draft  of  the 
poem  may  have  been  finished  by  1663  or  1665,  but  publication 
was  delayed  by  the  Great  Plague,  the  Great  Fire,  and  the 
difficulties  of  licensing.  In  1667  it  was  issued,  in  ten  books, 
and  the  author  received  for  it  just  ten  pounds.  A  second 
edition,  arranged  in  twelve  books  as  at  present,  was  printed 
in  the  last  year  of  his  life.  Meanwhile,  in  1671,  together  with 
Samson  Agonistes,  appeared  the  four  books  of  Paradise  Re- 
gained. This  sequel,  however,  which  recounts  Christ's  resist- 
ance to  the  temptation  in  the  wilderness,  is  intrinsically  of  lesser 
poetic  interest,  and  contains  no  merit  that  is  not  more  con- 
spicuous in  the  larger  poem.  The  verse  of  both  is  blank  iambic 
pentameter,  which  Milton  had  already  used  in  Camus,  and 
which  he  employed  now  in  the  conviction  that  rhyme  was  "the 
invention  of  a  barbaric  age,"  of  no  true  musical  delight.  Per- 
haps he  felt,  too,  that  his  subject  demanded  larger  freedom. 
He  certainly  made  a  virtually  new  instrument  for  his  needs. 
He  shunned  the  extreme  license  of  the  dramatists,  keeping  his 
lines  always  well  girt,  yet  distributing  accents  and  pauses  with 
consummate  cunning.  This,  together  with  the  splendor  of 
his  diction  and  the  stateliness  of  his  inverted  and  involved 
style,  yields  a  verse  which  in  its  own  quality  remains  unexcelled, 
and  which,  though  technically  the  same  as  the  dramatic  blank 
verse,  we  must  forever  distinguish  as  "epic"  or  "Miltonic" — the 
verse  of  the  "mighty-mouth'd  inventor  of  harmonies,"  the 
"God-gifted  organ-voice  of  England." 


152  CAROLINE   AND   PURITAN   PERIon 

The  majesty  of  the  invocation  which  announces  the  theme 
of  Paradise  Lost  is  remarkably  sustained  through  the  ten  thou- 
sand and  more  lines  that  follow: — 

"Of  Man's  first  disobedience,  and  the  fruit 
Of  that  forbidden  tree  whose  mortal  taste 
Brought  death  into  the  World,  and  all  our  woe, 
With  loss  of  Eden,  till  one  greater  Man 
Restore  us,  and  regain  the  blissful  seat. 
Sing,  Heavenly  Muse,  that,  on  the  secret  top 
Of  Oreb,  or  of  Sinai,  didst  inspire 
That  shepherd  who  first  taught  the  chosen  seed 
In  the  beginning  how  the  heavens  and  earth 
Rose  out  of  Chaos." 

The  scene  of  the  epic,  or  drama,  as  one  is  constantly  tempted 
to  call  it,  is  the  Universe  at  the  time  of  the  creation, — Heaven, 
Hell,  and  the  Eden  of  the  new-made  Earth.  Satan  and  the 
host  of  rebel  angels,  cast  out  from  heaven,  plot  the  downfall  of 
man  in  revenge  for  their  own  overthrow.  In  j)ursuit  of  his 
purpose,  the  Tempter  makes  his  way  into  Paradise;  and  the  poet 
rehearses,  with  pomp  and  circum.stunce,  in  his  lofty  verse, 
the  simple  story  of  the  third  chapter  of  Genesis.  The  super- 
natural elements  are  conceived  on  a  colossal  scale.  The  Uni- 
versal Infinitude  is  mapped  out  into  The  Empyrean,  Chaos,  and 
Hell,  with  The  "World,  or  Starry  Universe,  occupying  a  small 
circumscribed  and  almost  central  position,  as  marked  out  by 
the  golden  compasses  of  the  Son: — 

"One  foot  he  centred,  and  the  other  turned 
Round  through  the  vast  profundity  obscure, 
And  said,  'Thus  far  extend,  thus  far  thy  bounds; 
This  be  thy  just  circumference,  O  World.'  " 
(VII.     228-231.) 

The  outcast  Angels  fall  for  nine  days,  and  for  nine  days  more 
lie  confounded,  "rolling  in  the  fiery  gulf"  of  Hell.  The  huge 
council-chamber  of  Pandemonium  rises  out  of  the  earth  "  like  an 
exhalation."  When  Satan  has  winged  his  difficult  way  again 
upward  through  Chaos,  he  spies,  beneath  the  empyreal  Heaven, 


MILTON  153 

"hanging  in  a  golden  chain, 
ThiB  pendent  World,  in  bigness  as  a  star 
Of  smallest  magnitude  close  by  the  moon." 
(II.     1051-1053.) 

Yet  in  Paradise  itself  we  find  the  natural  world  of  "  lawns,  or 
level  downs,  and  flocks  Grazing  the  tender  herb;"  of  "Flowers 
of  all  hue,  and  without  thorn  the  rose;"  of  vernal  airs  and  trem- 
bling leaves  and  murmuring  waters;  of  all  kinds  of  living  crea- 
tures, and  in  their  midst 

"Two  of  far  nobler  shape,  erect  and  tall, 
God-like  erect,  with  native  honor  clad, 
In  naked  majesty." 

(IV.     288-290.) 

It  will  be  seen  by  what  means  Milton  has  made  an  impres- 
sive and  to  many  even  fascinating  poem  out  of  material  which, 
as  Dr.  Johnson  says,  is  wholly  wanting  in  human  interest.  He 
brought  to  it  an  imagination  equal  to  the  utmost  scope  of  his 
celestial  machinery,  so  that  immeasurable  spaces  and  illimi- 
table aeons  are  in  his  hands  as  bricks  and  mortar  in  the  hands 
of  a  builder.  He  ransacks  the  forests  of  Norway,  the  mines 
of  India,  the  magnificence  of  Babylon,  for  images  and  com- 
parisons. He  tirelessly  searches  both  history  and  fable  and 
brings  spoil  of  heroic  deeds  and  sounding  names  from  classic 
and  Biblical  lore.  He  measures  his  syllables,  his  inverted 
phrases,  his  involved  sentences,  with  the  ear  of  one  to  whom 
the  rarest  music  is  native,  and  his  blank  verse  marches  in 
bars  and  slips  into  cadences  that  ask  no  help  of  rhyme.  Yet 
through  all  the  mazes  of  music  and  imagery,  such  as  might  well 
bewilder  a  less  consecrated  poet,  he  keeps  before  him  the 
stern  purpose  of  his  poem,  to  "justify  the  ways  of  God  to  man." 
We  follow  the  story  to  the  end,  witness  the  fall  of  our  First 
Parents  from  their  happy  state,  hear  their  half-vain  repentance, 
listen  to  the  doom  of  mortality  and  expulsion  from  Paradise, 
and  attend  in  not  uncomforted  sorrow  as  the  Archangel  Michael 
and  the  flaming  sword  lead  them  without  the  eastern  gate,  where 


154  CAKOLIXE   A\I)   PURITAN   PERIOD 

"They,  hand  in  hand,  with  wandering  steps  and  slow, 
Through  Eden  took  thoir  soUtary  way." 

(XII.     648, 649.) 

As  beauty  is  the  dominant  (juality  of  Milton'.s  early  poetry 
sublimity  is  the  dominant  (quality  here.  It  is  seen  in  the  spacious- 
ness of  the  setting,  the  vastness  of  the  more  than  planetary 
abysses  that  are  unfolded,  where  height  and  dej)th  and  every 
other  creature  known  to  the  soaring  imagination  dwell.  It 
is  seen  in  the  imaginative  sweep  of  history  and  legend.  It  is 
felt  in  the  very  harmonies  of  the  verse,  wherein  diphthong  and 
liquid  conspire  to  make  music  even  of  otherwise  superfluous 
j)roper  names.  But  more  than  all  else  it  is  felt  in  the  exalted 
tone  of  the  poem,  the  "high  seriousness,"  which,  says  Matthew 
Arnold,  was  beyond'  the  reach  of  Chaucer,  but  was  given  to 
poets  like  Homer  and  Shakespeare,  Dante  and  Milton.  In  pure 
moral  loftiness  indeed,  we  mu.st  account  Dante  and  Milton 
supreme,  the  one  the  poet  of  mediaeval  Europe,  the  other  of 
Puritan  England. 


CHAPTER  XII 


'     (MILTON'S 

Paradise 

Lost) 

Moliere 

BUNYAN 

Kaclne 

BUTLEK 

La  Fontaine 

PEPYS 

Boileau 

EVKLYN 

Bossuet 

TEMPLE 

Feuelon 

LOCKE 

Spinoza 

COMIC  DRAMATISTS 

Leibnitz 

DRYDEN 

Murillo 

Dictionary  of 
the  French 
Academy 

THE   RESTORATION  AND   THE    REVOLUTION — AGE   OF  DRYDEN 
1660-1700 


Charles  IT 1660'H5 

Great  Plague 1665 

London  Fire 1666 

Triple  Alliance 1668 

''Popish  Plot." 1678 

Rye  H(mse  Plot. 1683 

James  II ]68r>-88 

The  "  Bloody  Assizes". 168.5 

Declaration  of  Rights 1680 

William  and  Mary 1680-1702 

Battle  of  the  Boyne 1690 


After  the  death  of  Cromwell  the  Protectorate  failed  to 
afford  a  stable  government  and  was  followed  in  1660  by  the 
restoration  of  the  Stuarts  in  the  person  of  Charles  II.  The 
history  of  the  succeeding  thirty  or  forty  years  was  in  many 
respects  a  repetition  of  what  had  gone  before.  The  Stuart 
rule  meant  t\Tanny,  and  also  a  wavering  between  the  Protestant 
and  Catholic  forms  of  worship,  with  a  leaning  toward  the  latter 
that  bred  discontent  in  the  strong  Protestant  element.  When 
the  second  James  followed  the  second  Charles,  the  discontent 
came  to  a  head.  James's  reign  was  short.  The  Revolution 
of  1688  set  William  of  Orange  and  INIary  (the  daughter  of 
James)  on  the  throne,  and  England,  which  had  already  formed 
a  Triple  Alliance  with  The  Netherlands  and  Sweden,  now  joined 
in  the  Great  Alliance  of  the  Protestant  powers  of  Europe  against 
France.  At  the  same  time  the  Declaration  of  Rights  accepted 
by  William,  guaranteed  once  more  the  powers  of  Parliament 
and  the  liberties  of  the  people. 

1.55 


150  THE    RESTORATION-    AND  THE    REVOH'TION 

Charles  II.  was  himself  a  good-humored  kitig,  whose 
dcsjjotic  traits  scarcely  showed  themselves  through  the  early 
part  of  his  twenty-five  years'  reign.  Brave,  gay,  witty,  and 
indolent,  he  was  devoted  almost  wholly  to  his  personal  pleasure, 
bringing  with  him  from  the  continent,  where  he  had  mostly  lived 
since  the  fall  of  his  father,  the  dissolute  manners  of  the  French 
court.  But  however  popular  he  may  have  been  with  certain 
courtiers,  his  selfishness  could  mean  no  good  to  the  people. 
The  essential  want  of  harmony  between  king  and  subjects, 
which  residted  in  more  or  less  treasonable  plots,  with  the 
outward  calamities — the  Great  Plague  which  in  1665  swept 
away  a  third  of  the  population  of  London,  the  Great  Fire  of 
the  following  year,  and  disasters  on  the  sea — combined  to  make 
this  a  sad  period  for  England.  It  was  in  Charles  II.'s  reign  that 
the  name  Tory  Avas  first  applied  to  the  court  party — the  old 
Cavaliers,  or  Royalists;  and  Whig  to  the  country  party- — the 
Roundheads,  or  Puritans. 

Literary  history  would  not  have  a  great  deal  to  record  of 

the  earlier  years  of  the  Restoration,  had  not  iMilton,  in  the 

obscurity   of   his   retirement,    composed   the   great 

Sarmiel         poem  we  have  already  described — a  poem  which 

"      '  this  age,  if  it  may  be  said  to    have    produced  it 

1612-1680.  „  ,         ,         ,  .  ,     ,. 

Samuel         ^^  ^^^'  produced   only  to  its  own  contrasted  dis- 

Pepys,  honor.     A  few  of  the  cavalier  singers,  the  "Caro- 

1633-1703.    lines"  of  the  first  Charles,  were  alive  and  not  quite 

tuneless.     Samuel  Butler,  a  Caroline  of  the  second, 

lampooned  the  Parliamentary  party  and  the  Puritans  in  his  long 

and  immensely  popular  poem  of  Hudihras  (1663-1678),  which 

gave  the  language  a  new  adjective,  as  it  gave  literature  scores 

of  epigrammatic  short  couplets  which  no  satirist  in  the  same 

kind  has  surpassed.*      Samuel  Pepys,  a  busy  and  observing 

clerk  in  the  navy  department,  kept,  during  the  first  ten  years 

♦Example  of  the  Hudibrastlc  couplet,  or  distlch:— 

"  For  those  that  iJy  may  fight  agaiu. 
Which  he  can  never  do  that's  slain." 


PEPTS  157 

of  the  Restoration,  a  minute  Dianj  in  cipher,  which  was  pub- 
lished in  1825,  and  which,  by  its  interesting  revelations,  poHtical 
and  personal,  raises  the  author  to  a  position  of  historical  and 
hterary  importance,*  A  little  later,  Sir  William  Temple  at- 
tained eminence  as  a  writer  of  polished  essays ;  and  John  Locke- 
published  his  great  essay  on  The  Human  Understanding  (1690), 
in  which  the  theory  is  upheld  that  all  knowledge  is  derived  from 
experience,  a  theory  quite  in  accord  with  Bacon's  insistence 
upon  the  experimental  method  in  science.  Throughout  the 
period  there  was  a  re\ived  activity  in  the  drama,  but  never, 
perhaps,  has  the  rule  of  extremes  in  reaction  been 

p.        , .  ,     better  exemplified  than  in  the  character  of  the  stage- 
Dramatists.  ^     ^  °   , 

plays  which  became  popular  after  the  twenty  years' 
suppression  of  the  theatres.  The  Restoration  drama,  as  ex- 
hibited by  the  comedies  of  Etherege,  ^Yycherley,  Congreve, 
and  others,  is  synonjinous  with  all  that  is  impudently  witty, 
irreverent,  and  licentious,  and  marks  the  lowest  stage  of  morality, 
or  immorality,  which  that  kind  of  writing  in  English  has  reached. 
Some  very  good  tragedy,  however,  was  written  by  Otway  and 
Dryden,  and  indeed  Dryden  is  in  every  way  the  great  redeeming 
figure  of  the  age.  He  belongs,  however,  in  liis  best  work,  to  the 
latter  part  of  it,  and  represents  so  fully  the  new  spirit  that  before 
considering  him  we  must  take  note  of  a  prose  writer  in  whom 
the  lingering  Puritan  spirit  was  still  represented,  and  who,  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  has  always  been  more  widely  read  than  any  of 
the  newer  school,  not  excluding  Dryden  himself. 

John  Bunyan  was  born  at  Elstow,  near  Bedford,  some  forty 
miles  north  of  London,  in  the  year  1628.  He  was  thus  twenty 
years  younger  than  IVIilton,  and  his  early  manhood  fell  in  the 

*  Example  of  the  matter  and  style  of  Pepys's  Diary:-^ 
"  So  I  forced  the  watermen  to  land  us  on-  Redriffe  side,  and  so  walked 
together  till  Sir  W.  Warren  and  I  parted  near  his  house  and  thence  I  walked 
quite  over  the  fields  home  by  light  of  link,  one  of  my  watermen  carrying  it, 
and  I  reading  by  the  light  of  it,  It  being  a  very  fine,  clear ,  dry  night.  So  to  Cap- 
lain  Cocke's,  and  there  sat  and  talked,  especially  with  his  Counsellor,  about  his 
prize  goods,  that  has  done  him  good  turn;  here  I  supped  and  so  home  to  bed, 
with  great  content  that  the  plague  is  decreased  to  132,  the  whole  being  but  330." 


158  THE   RESTORATION   AND  THE   REVOLUTION 

time  of  the  Commonwealth,  his  muturer  years  in  that  of  the  Resto- 
ration.    His  father  was  a  tinker,  an  occupation  then  held  in  low 

repute.     His  schooling  was  carried  no  farther  than 

John  rcaciing  and  writing,  and  was  very  poor  at  that;  he 

""^""'        never    wrote   a   good    hand,    nor   learned  to  spell. 

Doubtless  he  ran  wild  among  the  village  youth,  but 
his  badness  seems  to  have  consisted  chiefly  in  swearing,  the 
other  sins  of  which  his  over-tender  conscience  accuses  him,  bell- 
ringing,  dancing,  and  the  like,  being  comparatively  trivial.  He 
served  a  while  as  a  soldier,  but  whether  in  the  Parliamentary 
army  we  cannot  be  certain.  He  married  a  woman  as  poor  as 
himself,  who  brought  him  for  dowry  the 'memory  of  a  godly 
father  and  two  books,  "The  Plain  Man's  Pathway  to  Heaven" 
and  "The  Practice  of  Piety."  Perhaps  it  is  not  too  fanciful  to 
see  in  the  titles  of  these  books  the  origin,  even  to  the  alliteration, 
of  the  title  of  his  own  great  book. 

The  more  intimate  life  of  Bunyan  is  faithfully  set  forth 
in  his  Grace  Abounding  to  the  Chief  of  Sinners  (166G),  one  of 
the  most  intensely  vivid  spiritual  records  ever  written.  Almost 
every  page  reveals  the  sensitiveness  of  his  conscience,  his  trials 
by  temptation,  his  wrestlings  with  voices  and  visions. 

"But  the  same  day  [Sabbath],  as  I  was  in  the  midst  of  a  game  at 
Cat,  and  having  struck  it  one  blow  from  the  Hole,  just  as  I  was  about 
to  strike  it  the  second  time,  a  Voice  did  suddenly  dart  from  Heaven 
into  my  Soul,  which  said,  Wilt  thou  leave  thy  sins  and  go  to  Heaven,  or 
have  thy  sins  and  go  to  Hell  ?  At  this  I  was  put  to  an  exceeding  Maze. 
Wherefore,  leaving  my  Cat  upon  the  ground,  I  looked  up  to  Heaven, 
and  was  as  if  I  had,  with  the  Eyes  of  my  understanding,  seen  the  Lord 
Jesus  looking  down  upon  me,  as  being  very  hotly  displeased  with  mc, 
and  as  if  he  did  severely  threaten  me  with  some  grievous  Punishment 
for  these  and  other  my  ungodly  Practices." 

Such  a  temperament  could  lead  to  but  one  issue.  After  his 
conversi(m  he  went  about  the  midland  counties  j^reaching,  at 
the  same  time  practicing  the  craft  which  he  had  learned  of  his 
father.  But  because  he  was  a  Nonconformist  and  because  at 
the  Restoration  the  laws  against  unlicensed  preaching  were 


BUN  VAX  159 

severely  enforced,  lie  was  arrested  and  thrown  into  Bedford 
jail.  There  he  remained  for  twelve  years,  one  of  thousands  in 
like  condition  throughout  England,  until  the  suspension  of  the 
laws  in  1672.  He  then  resumed  his  preaching.  His  fame 
spread,  for  his  gift  was  really  marvellous;  a  chapel  was  built 
for  him  at  Bedford;  and  he  sometimes  went  to  London,  where 
great  crowds  came  to  hear  him.  He  died,  at  the  age  of  sixty, 
of  a  fever  brought  on  by  his  faithful  ministrations. 

But  Bunyan's  fame,  even  in  his  lifetime,  did  not  depend  on 
his  preaching  alone.  He  was  an  industrious  writer,  for  all  his 
want  of  training  or  technical  skill.  He  had  published  several 
tracts  before  his  imprisonment.  The  later  Grace  Abounding, 
mentioned  above,  went  through  several  editions  in  the  year  of 
its  publication.  Besides  this,  there  were  the  Life  and  Death 
of  Mr.  Badman  (1680),  a  realistic  story  in  dialogue  form,  and 
the  Holy  War  (1682),  an  allegory  inferior  only  to  The  Pilgrim's 
Progress.  But  The  Pilgrims  Progress,  then  as  now,  eclipsed 
all  the  rest.  It  was  written  in  prison,  possibly  during  a  short 
period  of  later  imprisonment.  At  any  rate,  it  appeared  first  in 
1678  (second  part  1684).  Bunyan  had  had,  as  constant  com- 
panions during  his  confinement,  Foxe's  Book  of  Martyrs  and 
the  Bible;  and  to  these  two  books  his  own  pen  added  a  third 
which  in  popularity  and  influence  speedily  took  rank  with  them. 
For  more  than  a  century,  it  is  true,  it  remained  a  cottagers'  book 
only — the  learned  held  it  in  contempt;  but  simple  and  learned 
now  unite  in  praising  it. 

"As  I  walk'd  through  the  wilderness  of  this  world,  I  lighted  on  a 
certain  place  whore  was  a  Den,  and  I  laid  me  down  in  that  place  to 
sleep;  and  as  I  slept,  I  dreamed  a  Dream." 

Thus  it  opens,  in  very  Dantesque  fashion;*  and  the  char- 
acter of  the  allegory  at  once  suggests  comparison  with  the  Divine 
Comedy,  and  with  that  other  great  allegory  of  Christendom, 

*  "  Midway  iipon  the  journey  of  our  life 
I  found  niyself  within  a  forest  darlc, 
Forthe  straightforward  pathway  had  been  lost." 

—Inferno:  Longfellow'.s  translation. 


160  THE  RESTORATION   AM)  THE  REVOLUTION 

Spenser'.s  Faerie  Queenc.  But  those  were  both  conscious  hterary 
productions  in  a  sense  in  which  this  was  not.  We  feel  that 
Bunyan's  book  wrote  itself,  and  it  is  idle  to  look  farther  than 
the  Bible  for  model  or  inspiration. 

"It  came  from  mine  own  heart,  so  to  my  head, 
And  thence  into  my  fingers  trickled." 

We  see  everywhere  the  same  imagination  that  in  his  earlier 
books  had  pictured  himself  in  his  sins  "as  on  a  miry  Bog  that 
shook  if  I  did  but  stir,"  and  likened  the  desires  of  his  evil  heart 
to  "a  Clog  on  the  Leg  of  a  Bird  to  hinder  her  from  flying." 
The  pictures  are  bitten  in  as  with  acid,  as  indeed  they  had 
been  bitten  into  his  own  mind  with  the  acid  of  sharp  experience. 
Imaginations  like  Dante's  and  Bunyan's  have  this  way.  They 
see  things  with  a  terrible  intensity  and  reality;  and  just  as  the  nine 
circles  of  hell  wound  visibly  beneath  Dante's  feet,  or  as  the  twelve 
gates  of  the  heavenly  Jerusalem  glistened  before  the  eyes  of 
John  the  Apostle,  so  did  the  Slough  of  Despond  spue  out  its 
filth  before  Bunyan,  and  the  Valley  of  Death  spread  its  shadows, 
and  the  Delectable  Mountains  lift  their  vineyards.  The  wonder 
of  it  is  that  he  could  take  the  simple  facts  of  his  very  simple 
life,  the  roads  and  sheep-trails  that  he  had  travelled,  the  fields 
and  fogs  that  he  knew,  the  markets  and  fairs  where  he  had 
plied  his  trade,  the  men  and  women  of  his  acquaintance,  and 
weave  them  into  an  allegory  of  the  soul's  progress  that  should 
be  as  true  for  ten  thousand  men  as  it  was  for  him,  and  yet 
sacrifice  nothing  of  the  native  distinctness  of  these  facts.  Once 
more  in  the  history  of  the  world's  literature,  allegory  has  almost 
belied  its  name.  In  a  truer  sense  than  even  Milton's  magnifi- 
cent epics  of  Paradise,  is  this  Pilgrivi's  Progress  in  homespun 
prose  the  great  poem  of  English  Puritanism. 

While  the  literature  of  Puritanism  was  pursuing  thus,  so 
to  speak,  its  underground  way — Milton,  in  blindness  and  retire- 
ment, and  Bunyan,  in  a  common  prison,  recording  each  the 
visions  that  visited  their  sorely  tried    spirits — the  literature  of 


DRYDEN  161 

court  and  castle,  of  the  universities  and  theatres  and  coffee 
houses,  went  gaily  on.  The  leader  of  the  group  to  whom  in 
this  age  fell  the  honor  of  carrying  forward  the  torch  that  had  been 
handed  on  from  the  Elizabethans  by  the  Caroline  poets  and 
Cowley  and  Waller,  was  unquestionably  John  Dryden.  The 
*  torch,  it  should  be  said  in  passing,  had  been  relighted  at  a  differ- 
ent fire,  but  the  account  of  that  may  for  the  present  be  deferred. 
Dryden,  who  was  born  in  Northamptonshire,  came  of  a 
family   of   Puritan   sympathies.     One   of   his   earliest   poems, 

written  shortly  after  he  left  Cambridge,  was  an 
John  elegy  upon  the  death  of  Cromwell.     But  when  the 

Dryden,  political  stress  seemed  to  demand  the  recall  of 
1G31-1700.    Q]^.^T\es,,  Dryden  changed  heart  with  the  nation  and 

celebrated  the  Restoration  in  the  heroic  couplets 
of  his  Astrwa  Redux  (1660).  His  first  important  poem  was 
his  Annus  Mirahllis  (1667).  The  "year  of  wonders"  cele- 
brated by  this  poem  was  the  year  1666,  the  year  of  the  Dutch 
War  and  of  the  London  Fire,  both  of  which  events  the  poet 
managed  to  turn  to  the  glory  of  England  and  her  king.  For 
instance,  when  the  latter  is  pictured  as  coming  forth  to  view  the 
fire,  exposing  to  the  driving  sparks  his  "sacred  face" — 

"More  than  his  guards  his  sorrows  made  him  known, 

And  pious  tears  which  down  his  cheeks  did  shower; 
The  wretched  in  his  grief  forgot  their  own: 
So  much  the  pity  of  a  king  has  power." 

The  poem  as  a  whole  is  confused,  and  disfigured  by  affectations, 
but  it  shows  smoothness  of  versification,  occasionally  rare  dig- 
nity, and  always  surprising  neatness  in  turning  a  fine  fancy. 

Dryden  was  then  "Mr.  Dryden  the  poet,"*  a  Fellow  of  the 
Royal  Society,  living  in  London,  married  to  the  daughter  of  an 

*  •  In  Covent  Garden  to-night,  going  to  fetch  home  my  wife,  I  stopped  at 
the  great  Coffee  House  there,  where  I  never  was  before ;  where  Dryden,  the  i)oet 
IknewatCambridge,  and  all  the  wits  of  the  town.  .  .  .  And  had  I  had  time 
then,  or  could  at  other  times,  it  will  be  good  coming  thither;  for  there,  I  per- 
ceive is  very  witty  and  pleasant  discourse."— Pepys's  Diary,  Feb.  3,  1664. 
Dxyden  soon  came  to  be  the  presiding  genius  of  this  particular  coffee  house, 
which  was  later  known  as  Will's. 


162  THE  RESTORATION   AND  THE  REVOLUTION 

earl,  and  soon  to  l)c  appointed  Historiographer  Royal  and  Poet 
Laureate.    For  fifteen  years,  however,  he  turned  aside  from  poetry 

proper  to  the  drama,  apparently  more  for  reasons  of 
Plays.  prosperity  than  from  personal  preference.     In  this 

period  he  wrote  nearly  a  score  of  plays,  both  com-^ 
t'dies  and  tragedies,  bad  and  good,  but  few  of  the  first  order. 
In  comedy,  he  was  excelled  by  the  comic  dramatists  who  have 
before  been  mentioned.  He  could  not  compete  with  them  in  wit, 
though  he  endeavored  to  in  impudence.  His  tragi-comedy.  The 
Maiden  Queen  (1667),  scored  a  great  success;  and  his  tragedy, 
All  Far  Love  (1678),  marks  perhaps  the  greatest  height  to  which 
the  tragic  drama  of  the  period  reached.  The  last  named  chal- 
lenges comparison  with  Shakespeare's  Antony  and  Cleopatra,  of 
which,  both  in  subject  and  style,  it  is  partly  an  imitation.  This 
dramatic  work  is  interesting  as  showing  a  great  change  in  Dry- 
den's  theories  and  tastes.*  He  began  with  a  devotion  to  rhyme, 
after  the  fashion  of  the  French  drama,  and  wrote  his  tragedies 
or  tragic  parts  in  heroic  couplets,  stoutly  defending  this  style  in 
the  face  of  ridicule.  He  even  turned  Paradise  Lost  into  a  rhymed 
play.  But  after  a  time  he  confessed  to  having  grown  "  weary  of 
his  long-loved  mistress,  Rhyme,"  and  returned  to  the  native  Eng- 
lish blank- verse  freedom.  It  was  then  that  he  wrote  All  for  Love, 
the  success  of  which  certainly  vindicated  his  changed  faith. 
This  play  shows  his  real  admiration  for  Shakespeare,  but  it  shows 
also  his  adherence  to  the  important  tenets  of  the  French  stage. 
The  classical  "unities"  are  kept  in  mind.  The  action  is  more 
restricted,  both  in  time  and  place,  than  in  Antony  and  Cleopatra, 

*  Malherbe,  the  court  poet  of  France,  who  was  contemporary  with  Shakes- 
peare, had  long  before  "regulated  "  French  verse  by  insisting  upon  a  simple 
style,  the  clear  expression  of  a  few  orderly  ideas,  a  Parisian  purity  of  diction, 
mathematical  precision  of  metre,  and  perfect  rhyme.  Boileau,  the  contempo- 
rary of  Dryden,  upheld  the  same  principles  in  his  famous  Art  of  Poetry  (1674). 
At  the  same  time  the  French  drama,  in  the  hands  of  Corneille  and  Racine,  had 
become  thoroughly  classical  in  its  observance  of  the  unities  and  other  self- 
imposed  laws,  attaining  to  that  ideal  which  Jonson  almost  alone  among  Eliza- 
bethan English  dramatists  had  approached  to.  In  Dryden's  time  this  French 
influence  was  especially  strong.  (Compare  what  is  said  at  the  beginning 
and  end  of  Chapter  XIII.) 


DRYD^EN  163 

and  the  characters  are  throughout  impelled  by  a  single  motive. 
The  second,  and  a  much  more  important,  period  of  Dryden's 
literary  career  began  with  his  return  to  poetry  proper  in  1G81, 
when  he  was  in  his  fiftieth  year.  This  is  the  date  of 
Satires,  etc.  his  first  great  satire,  Absalom  and  Achitophel.  The 
time  was  one  of  political  unrest,  of  "popish"  plots 
and  the  like,  caused  by  the  dissatisfaction  of  the  Protestants  over 
the  prospect  that  James,  the  king's  brother,  who  was  a  Catholic, 
would  succeed  to  the  throne.  A  strong  Opposition,  led  by  the 
Earl  of  Shaftesbury,  favored  the  Duke  of  Monmouth,  the  king's 
illegitimate  son.  It  was  this  situation  which  gave  Dryden  the  oc- 
casion of  his  satire.  Absalom,  in  the  Bible  chronicle,  is  an  undu- 
tiful  son  in  rebellion  against  King  David,  his  father.  Absalom 
was  made  to  stand  allegorically  for  Monmouth,  and  Absalom's 
evil  counsellor  Achitophel  for  Shaftesbury.  The  poem,  com- 
posed in  the  heroic  couplets  which  had  served  tragedy  so  ill  but 
which  are  peculiarly  suited  to  epigrammatic  and  satiric  verse, 
sprang  into  immediate  popularity.  The  next  year  appeared 
another  satire  aimed  at  Shaftesbury,  called  The  Medal;  and 
later  was  published  a  second  part  of  Absalom  and  Achitophel. 
Meanwhile,  bitter  replies  had  been  evoked,  one  from  the  rather 
dull  poet  and  playwright,  Thomas  Shad  well.  Dryden  im- 
mediately turned  upon  Shadwell,  and  immortalized  his  dulness 
in  MacFlechnoe  (1G82).  Five  years  later,  when  James  II,  was 
on  the  throne  and  Dryden  had  become  a  professed  Roman 
Catholic,  he  used  the  same  instrument  of  incisive  heroics  for 
the  religious  allegory  of  The  Hind  and  the  Panther  (1687),  in 
which  the  "milk-white  Hind"  that, 

"immortal  and  unchanged, 
Fed  on  the  lawns  and  in  the  forest  ranged," 

is  the  Church  of  Rome,  and  the  Panther  is  the  Church  of  Eng- 
land. Dryden  was  then,  in  spite  of  the  many  attacks  to  which 
his  political  and  religious  verse  subjected  him,  almost  as  much 
of  an  autocrat  in  London  letters  as  Ben  Jonson  had  been  three 


164  THE  RESTORATION  AND  THE  REVOLUTION 

quarters  of  a  century  before,  or  as  Samuel  Johnson  was  to  be 

three  quarters  of  a  century  afterward. 

The  Revolution  of  1688,  the  dethronement  of  James,  and 

the  accession  of  William  and  Mary,  deprived  Dryden  at  once  of 

„  , ,         ,    his  public  offices  and  his  income.     Much  as  he  had 
Fables  and    ,  .  /  ,  ,.         .  .  •  ,     i        •     i     ,. 

Q^^  hitherto  shown  a  disposition  to  veer  with  the  wind  ot 

royal  favor,  it  was  quite  im[)ossible  that  he  should 
recant  again  and  become  a  Protestant  adherent  of  the  throne. 
There  was  nothing  for  him  but  retirement  and  literature.  Thus 
there  was  a  third  period  in  his  life,  as  remarkably  productive  in 
its  way  as  the  others  had  been.  He  wrote  more  plays,  and  then 
turned  his  attention  to  translation,  a  favorite  occupation  of  the 
declining  years  of  men  of  letters.  The  satires  of  Juvenal  anc'. 
Persius,  and  the  poems  of  Virgil,  were  thus  translated.  This 
was  little  more  than  very  good  hack-work.  But  better  work, 
indeed  the  very  flower  of  all  followed.  In  the  last  year  of  his 
life  he  published  the  volume  known  as  Fables.  Translations, 
he  called  them,  "from  Homer,  Ovid,  Boccaccio,  and  Chaucer." 
They  are  better  called  paraphrases,  since  Drj'den  has  retold  the 
stories  with  the  utmost  freedom.  The  best  is  the  moving  love 
story  of  Palamon  and  A  rcite,  Chaucer's  Knifjhtes  Tale.  Besides 
these,  the  volume  included  some  wholly  original  poems,  among 
them  the  second  Ode  for  St.  Cecilia's  Day,  a  "Pindaric"  com- 
posed for  the  festival  of  a  London  musical  society  in  1697.  He 
had  written  a  similar  song  ten  years  before,  but  the  second, 
which  is  called  Alexander's  Feast,  is  the  greater,  rising  again 
and  again  to  heights  of  lyric  rhapsody: — 

"The  praise  of  Bacchus  then  the  sweet  musician  sung, 
Of  Bacchus  ever  fair  and  ever  young. 
The  jolly  god  in  triumph  comes ; 
Sound  the  trumpets,  beat  the  drums; 
Flushed  with  a  purple  grace 
He  shows  his  honest  face : 
Now  give  the  hautboys  breath ;  he  comes,  he  comes. 
Bacchus,  ever  fair  and  young, 


DRYDEN  165 

Drinking  joys  did  first  ordain ; 
Bacchus'  blessings  are  a  treasure, 
Drinking  is  the  soldier's  pleasure ; 
Rich  the  treasure, 
Sweet  the  pleasure. 
Sweet  is  pleasure  after  pain." 

Dryden  is  one  of  those  men  of  letters  who  to-day  Hve  moi-e 

in  their  fame  than  in  the  popularity  of  their  works.     The  number 

of  his  readers  is  small  compared  with  the  readers  of 

...  ,      Milton  or  Bunvan.     Nevertheless  his  place  in  liter- 

ishcfi  ana  ^  "■  ^   , 

Influence,  ature  is  secure,  and  the  character  and  influence  of 
his  work  cannot  be  lightly  passed  by.  His  place  is  in 
the  porch  of  the  classical  edifice  which  the  next  century  reared. 
We  have  intimated  that  though  he  .stood  in  the  line  of  direct 
English  succession,  he  and  his  group  departed  materially  from 
the  traditions  of  his  predecessors.  The  reigning  classicism  of 
French  literature  was,  as  we  have  said,  the  immediate  foreign 
influence,  though  this  only  fell  in  with  tendencies  already  existing 
in  England.  Something  of  the  spirit,  the  fire,  the  freedom,  of  an 
earlier  time  remained  with  Dryden,  and  to  it  we  owe  many  a 
splendid  outburst  in  his  poetry.  But  for  the  most  part  he  stood 
by  the  somewhat  artificial  standards  which  he  adopted  or  which 
his  critical  theories  helped  to  create.  In  other  words,  he  was  dis- 
posed to  prescribe  laws  to  poetry — to  regulate  it.  The  new 
couplet  which  he  took  from  Waller  and  Cowley  was  a  regulated 
thing,  which  Pope,  as  we  shall  see,  was  to  regulate  still  farther.* 
It  differed  from  the  old  couplet,  not  in  actual  number  of  stresses, 
but  in  the  greater  uniform.ity  of  beat,  balance  of  parts,  and  unity 
of  the  whole.  Dryden's  experiments  with  it  served  to  show 
clearly  its  bounds.  For  expansive  poetry,  lyric  or  tragic,  it  was 
unsuited.  But  for  straight-away  narrative  or  didactic  verse  it 
was  good;  while  for  the  vigor  of  invective  or  the  pungency  of 

*  •'  Waller  was  smooth ;  but  Dryden  taught  to  join 
The  varying  verse,  the  full-resounding  line, 
The  long  majestic  march,  and  energy  divine."— Popj;. 
Dryden  frequently  varied  his  couplets  with  triplets  and  with  Alexandrines. 


166  THE  RESTORATION'   AM)  THE  UEVOLUTIOX 

pointed  satire  it  was  ahsolutcly  the  best  iiLstrumcnt  over  <lcvised. 

Such  adherence  to  formaUty  carried  with  it  a  restriction  of 
matter  and  theme,  if  indeed  it  was  not  this  increasing  restriction 
that  helped  to  fix  the  form.  Certain  it  is  tiiat  poetry  in  the  hands 
of  Dryden,  with  all  its  frecpient  gorgeousness,  grew  less  "  rich  and 
strange."  Wf)rdsworth  said  that  there  was  not  in  the  whole 
body  of  his  works  "a  single  image  from  nature."  Johnson  .said 
that  he  had  little  power  over  the  pathetic  because  he  .seemed  "not 
much  acquainted  with  the  simple  and  elemental  pa.ssions."  His 
work  suffered,  too,  from  carelessness.  Devoted  to  "  correctness" 
as  a  principle,  he  often  neglected  to  observe  it  in  detail.  He  pro- 
duced enormously,  refu.sing  to  polish,  and  trusting  to  the  excel- 
lence of  what  was  good.  Again,  his  work  suffers  from  the  too 
frequently  local  or  temporary  interest  of  his  themes.  The  broad 
humanity  of  Shakespeare,  the  religious  passion  of  Milton  and 
Bunyan,  are  replaced  by  arguments  upon  matters  of  state,  or 
satires  aimed  at  passing  fashions  and  insignificant  men.  But  in 
spite  of  all  this,  his  range  ren\ains  very  great,  his  vigor  unequalled, 
and  his  mastery  in  the  field  of  his  own  highest  achievements 
unchallenged  by  the  best  of  his  disciples. 

One  other  count  to  his  credit  must  not  be  forgotten.  In  the 
course  of  his  defence  of  certain  theories  of  poetry,  he  produced  a 
,1  Critic  considerable  body  of  critical  prose,  conspicuously 
and  the  Essay  of  Dramatic  Poesy  (1668).     By  virtue  of 

Rpformer  this  he  is  recognized  as  the  leader  and  almost  the 
of  Frose.  founder  of  English  criticism,  and  along  with  that  as 
the  founder  of  modern  English  prose.  ]\Iodern  English  was 
already  a  thing  two  centuries  old.  But  prose  structure  and  style 
still  needed  regulation.  We  have  only  to  turn  to  ^Milton's  prose 
to  see  what  a  chaotic  condition  it  was  Aveltering  in.  Since  the 
time  of  Malory  it  had  departed  more  and  more  from  native  direct- 
ness and  simplicity,  wandering  into  a  hopeless  tangle  of  class- 
ical involutions  or  degenerating  into  ragged  uncouthness.  In 
the  hands  of  Bacon,  Milton,  and  Browne,  it  possessed  strength, 
or  majesty,  or  splendor,  beyond  anything,  indeed,  that  was  to  be 


DRYBEN  167 

known  again  for  nearly  two  centuries.  But  precision,  lucidity, 
and  regularity  it  did  not  possess.  These  were  imparted  to  it  by 
Dryden,  with  a  little  help  it  may  be  from  Cowley  before  him,  and 
doubtless  a  great  deal  of  long  unrecognized  help,  never  felt  by 
Dryden  himself,  from  the  humble  works  of  Bunyan.  The 
short,  manageable  sentence,  the  compact  phrase,  the  gram- 
matical coherence,  which  make  English  prose  to-day  the  great 
practical  "instrument  of  the  average  purpose,"  were  largely 
Dryden's  bequest.  The  very  ideals  to  which  he  tried  to  make 
his  poetry  conform  are  easily  seen  to  be  in  a  measure  prosaic 
ideals.  He  was  a  genuine  poet;  there  is  no  thought  of  gainsa3dng 
that;  but  he  was  eminently  the  poet  to  be  herald  of  that  eigh- 
teenth century  on  the  threshold  of  which  he  died,  the  "  age  of 
prose  and  reason," 


CHAPTER  XIII 


SWIFT 

Arabian  Nights,  tr. 

STEELE 

Into  French  (Gal- 

ADDISON 

land).  1704 

POPE 

LeSage's  Gil  Bias, 

DEFOE 

1715-1735 

Pr6vosts  Manon 

Lescaut.  1729-1733 

Koran,  tr.  into  Eng- 

lish (Sale).  1734 

Gottsched 

Bach 

WattPaii 

EARLY   EIGHTEENTH   CENTURY — AGE   OF  THE    CLASSICISTS 
1700-1740 


Act  of  Settlement 1701 

Qtteen  Anne 1702-1714 

Battle  of  Blenheim 1704 

Treaty  of  Utrecht 1713 

George  I 1714-1727 

Jacobite  Rising 1715 

South  Sea  Bubble 7720 

Walpole,  Prime  Minister 

1721-1742 

George  II 1727-1760 

Second  Jacdiite  Rising 1745 


The  character  of  the  period  now  under  discu.ssion  has  neces- 
sarily been  sketched  in  part  in  following  the  work  of  Dryden,  and 
not  a  great  deal  remains  to  say.  The  House  of  Stuart  was  still 
reigning,  but  Mary,  the  daughter  of  James,  and  her  husband 
William  of  Orange,  to  whom  she  brought  the  crown,  were 
Protestants,  as  was  also  Anne,  the  last  of  the  Stuarts,  who  suc- 
ceeded them;  furthermore  the  Act  of  Settlement  declared  against 
any  possible  Catholic  successor.  The  seventeenth  century 
passed,  and  with  it  most  of  the  political  and  religious  turmoil 
that  had  made  it  a  time  of  such  rapid  and  radical  changes.  The 
Parliament  had  finally  won  in  its  long  struggle  with  the  Crown; 
a  constitutional  form  of  government  was  firmly  established;  the 
Avill  of  the  Commons  was  to  be  henceforth  virtually  supreme. 
There  was  still  war  on  the  part  of  the  Grand  Alliance  against 
France  and  Spain,  and  there  were  jealousy  and  suspicion  at  home 
as  long  as  there  was  a  Jacobite  party  strong  enough  to  think  of 
rallying  to  the  standard  of  James's  son,  the  "Pretender."     Any 

168 


JOHKI'II    ^Vl>m?S<)N 

John  Dryden 


•TOXATIIAV    S^V1FT 


AGE  OF  THE  CLASSICISTS  160 

Tory,  indeed,  zealous  for  the  Church  and  jealous  of  his  landetl 
interests,  holding  by  the  Crown,  and  disposed  to  cling  to  his 
theory  of  the  divine  right  of  kings  regardless  of  Acts  of  Settle- 
ment, might  be  suspected  by  his  opponents  of  being  an  actual 
Jacobite;  while  the  Whigs,  rapidly  coming  into  power  through 
commercial  prosperity,  and  standing  for  the  extension  of  all 
social  and  political  privileges,  were  in  turn  suspected  of  being 
republicans.  But  in  spite  of  these  jealousies  and  of  the  Jacobite 
rising  of  1715,  England  was  gradually  settling  down  to  her  long 
modern  era  of  comparative  peace. 

In  society,  a  spirit  of  obedience  to  law,  and  of  subjection  of 
the  individual  to  the  common  good,  began  to  be  manifest  in  all 
directions.  The  immorality  that  had  come  in  with  the  Restora- 
tion, as  a  violent  reaction  from  Puritan  restraint,  and  had  spread 
from  court  and  theatre  until  it  infected  the  whole  upper  class  of 
society,  scarcely  excepting  the  clergy,  was  still  prevalent,  but 
there  were  signs  of  a  change.  In  1G98  the  Reverend  Jeremy 
Collier  published  his  Short  View  of  the  Projaneness  and  Immoral- 
ity of  the  English  Stage,  and  Dryden  himself  was  disposed  to 
plead  guilty.  For  long,  however,  the  moralists  and  satirists  had 
abundance  of  matter  upon  which  to  exercise  their  tongues  and 
pens.  Society  in  the  narrower  sense  of  the  term  was  extremely 
frivolous.  The  cocked  hats  and  periwigs,  the  lace  ruffles  and 
shoe-buckles,  the  stiff  stays  and  high  heels,  powder  and  patches, 
fans  and  lap-dogs,  that  we  associate  with  the  reign  of  Queen 
Anne,  were  but  the  external  indication  of  this.  The  young  men 
of  fashion  oscillated  between  the  drawing-rooms  and  the  parks, 
the  coffee  houses  and  the  play  houses.  The  coffee  and  chocolate 
houses  were  a  new  institution  which  had  followed  upon  the  late 
introduction  of  the  beverages  they  dispensed.  They  multiplied 
in  London  with  great  rapidity,  and  were  frequented,  according 
to  their  character,  by  politicians  or  writers,  merchants  or  gal- 
lants, gamblers  or  thieves.  Wit  was  in  great  demand  to  enliven 
the  gatherings,  and  "wit"  included  much,  from  the  eloquence 
of  a  Bolingbroke  or  the  irony  of  a  Swift  to  the  ribald  gossip 


170  EARLY  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY 

of  the  lowest  rake.  But  this  artificial  life  was  not  without  good 
results  in  the  friction  of  mind  upon  mind  and  the  stimulus  of 
healthy  rivalry  in  a  common  cause.  Individual  license  was 
more  and  more  repressed,  and  beneath  the  external  politeness 
and  worship  of  "good  breeding"  lay  a  growing  respect  for 
decency  and  a  desire  to  live  according  to  the  dictates  of  reason. 
Literature  followed.  Rhetorical  license  was  frowned  upon; 
romantic  enthusiasm  was  repressed.  The  wisdom  of  this  or 
that  political  measure,  the  extension  of  trade,  the  regulation  of 
pastimes,  the  observance  of  decorum  at  church  and  theatre,  in 
a  word,  the  practical  business  and  manners  of  the  age,  became 
the  engrossing  topics  of  conversation  and  letters.  Invention 
gave  place  to  wit  and  criticism,  imagination  to  common  sense. 
All  was  formal,  precise,  smooth,  classically  correct.  The  prose 
essay  became  fashionable;  satire  accentuated  its  point  and  polish; 
poetry,  accepting  the  French  critic  Boileau  as  dictator,  grew 
steadily  more  conventional  and  trim.*  In  fact,  having  descended 
to  the  argumentative  and  didactic  level,  poetry  was  less  distinct 
from  prose  in  this  age  than  in  almost  any  other.  The  fact  that 
Dryden  preserved  something  of  the  spirit  of  an  earlier  time  is 
the  main  reason  for  separating  his  work  from  the  work  of  the 
period  that  immediately  followed.  In  the  main,  the  late  seven- 
teenth and  the  early  eighteenth  centuries  conformed  to  the  same 
standards,  the  one  merely  completing  what  the  other  began. 
Both  found  their  ideal  in  that  classic  elegance  which  obtained  in 
Roman  literature  in  the  days  of  Augustus,  and  they  are  often 
called  our  Augustan  age.  When,  therefore,  at  the  turning 
of  the  century,  the  last  of  the  great  dramatists  was  laid  in  the 
tornb,  and  the  last  Stuart  seated  on  the  throne,  we  find  no  such 
facing  about  in  society  and  literature  as  the  Restoration  brought 
with  it  forty  years  l)eforc.  To  the  name  of  Dryden  it  is  easy 
to  link,  in  every  order  of  time  and  affinity,  the  names  of  Swift, 

♦Evelyn's  comment  on  Hamlet  is  extremely  significant:  "Now  these 
old  plays  begin  to  disgust  tliis  refined  century,  since  tlieir  majesties  liave  been 
so  long  abroad."' 


SWIFT  171 

Addison,  and  Pope.  The  two  latter  follow,  indeed,  at  the  dis- 
tance of  a  iull  generation,  yet  the  life  of  Swift,  traced  backward, 
overlaps  that  of  Dryden  by  more  than  thirty,  as  the  hfe  of  Defoe, 
who  must  be  reserved  for  a  yet  later  chaptei,  overlaps  it  by  more 
than  forty,  years. 

Great  as  was  Dryden's  satiric  verse,  and  great  as  was  Pope's 
that  followed,  the  position  of  England^s  greatest  satirist,  all  in 
all,  is  indisputably  held  by  Dryden's  cousin  and  more 
Jonatlian  immediate  successor,  Jonathan  Swift.  Of  English 
^wijt,  parentage,  Swift  was  born  in  Ireland,  in  1667,  the 

^  '  year  of  Milton's  Paradise  Lost,  and  Dryden's  Anmts 
Mirahilis.  He  was  educated  at  Trinity  College,  Dublin,  where 
he  received  a  degree  with  some  difficulty,  by  "special  grace." 
His  father  had  died  before  his  birth,  and  he  found  himself  largely 
dependent  on  relatives  and  friends  of  the  family.  He  was  taken 
as  a  secretary,  into  the  household  of  Sir  AVilliam  Temple,  in 
England,  and  thus  came  into  some  contact  with  scholars  and 
statesmen,  even  meeting  King  William  himself.  Finding  little 
prospect  of  political  preferment,  he  returned  to  Ireland  and 
took  religious  orders.  He  came  in  time  to  be  Dean  of  St. 
Patrick's,  Dublin,  but  he  never  attained  to  such  place  as  he 
desired  or  such  as  his  abilities  entitled  him  to. 

Svsift  wrote  industriously,  but  chiefly  as  the  occasion  sug- 
gested, without  definite  literary  aim;  he  rarely  published  over  his 
Earlii  o^^'^  name,  and,  with  the  single  exception  of  Gulliver's 

Writings.  Travels,  received  no  pay  for  his  work.  His  writings, 
"  Tale  of  however,  except  a\  hen  readers  were  too  obtuse  to  see 
a  lub.  ^jjg  ironical  drift,  went  straight  to  their  mark  and 

exercised  a  tremendous  influence.  His  first  important  publica- 
tion was  in  1704,  when  appeared  the  famous  Battle  of  the  Books 
and  the  much  more  justly  famous  Tale  of  a  Tub.  Both  had  been 
written  six  or  seven  years  earlier,  the  former  as  a  contribution  to 
a  very  old  controversy  over  the  relative  merits  of  "the  ancients 
and  moderns."  Temple,  in  supporting  the  ancient  writers,  had 
stirred  up  a  conflict  that  grew  personal,  and  Swift,  loving  a  good 


172  EARLY   EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

fight,  had  taken  his  patron's  part.  His  weapon,  of  course,  was 
satire,  and  the  whole  skit,  in  which  a  mock-heroic  war  is  waged 
between  the  books  in  St.  James's  Hbrary  over  "a  small  spot  of 
ground  lying  upon  one  of  the  two  tops  of  the  hill  Parnassus,"  is 
intensely  amusing.  But  the  subject  was  comparatively  remote 
in  interest.  A  Tale  of  a  Tub*  was  MTitten  in  support  of  the 
Established  Church  against  Romanism  on  the  one  side  and 
Dissent  on  the  other.  It  sets  forth  how  three  brothers.  Peter, 
Martin,  and  Jack,  were  bequeathed  by  their  dying  father  three 
new  coats,  which,  the  father  said,  would  grow  in  proportion 
with  their  bodies,  "lengthening  and  widening  of  themselves, 
so  as  to  be  always  fit.*'  Further  explicit  instructions  for  wear- 
ing them  were* given  in  the  will.  Peter  is  of  course  Rome, 
Martin  is  the  Church  of  England,  and  Jack  stands  for  the 
more  radical,  dissenting  sects.  The  significance  of  the  coatr 
and  of  the  changes  they  undergo  through  the  pressure  of  fash- 
ion is  not  hard  to  divine. 

"Now  the  coats  their  father  had  left  them  were,  it  is  true,  of  very 
good  cloth,  and,  besides,  so  neatly  sewn,  you  would  swear  they  were 
all  of  a  piece;  but,  at  the  same  time,  very  plain,  and  with  little  or  no 
ornament:  and  it  happened,  that  before  they  were  a  month  in  town, 
great  shoulder-knots  came  up;  straight  all  the  world  was  shoulder- 
knots  ;  no  approaching  the  ladies'  ruelles  without  the  quota  of  shoulder- 
knots.  That  fellow  cries  one,  has  no  soul ;  where  is  his  shoulder-knot? 
Our  three  brethren  soon  discovered  their  want  by  sad  experience, 
meeting  in  their  walks  with  forty  mortifications  and  indignities.  .  . 
In  this  unhappy  case,  they  went  immediately  to  consult  their  father's 
will,  read  it  over  and  over,  but  not  a  word  of  the  shoulder-knot;  what 
.should  they  do?  What  temper  should  they  find?  Obedience  was  ab- 
.solutely  necessary,  and  yet  shoulder-knots  appeared  extremely  requi- 
.site.  After  much  thought,  one  of  the  brothers,  who  happened  to  be 
more  book-learned  than  the  other  two,  said,  he  had  found  an  expe- 
dient. It  is  true,  said  he,  there  is  nothing  here  in  this  will,  totidem 
verbis,  making  mention  of  shoulder-knots:  but  I  dare  conjecture,  we 
may  find  them  inclusive,  or  totidem  syliahis.     This  distinction  was 

*  The  title  is  an  old  phrase,  meaning  little  more  than  "  a  foolish  story," 
and  may  be  found  as  the  title  of  one  of  Ben  .Jonsons  comedies.  Swift,  in  his 
Introduction,  gives  it  a  somewhat  more  specific  application. 


SWIFT  173 

immediately  approved  by  all ;  and  so  they  fell  again  to  examine  the 
will;  but  their  evil  star  had  so  directed  the  matter,  that  the  first  sylla- 
ble was  not  to  be  found  in  the  whole  writings.  Upon  which  disap- 
pointment, he,  who  found  the  former  evasion,  took  heart,  and  said. 
Brothers  there  are  yet  hopes;  for  though  we  cannot  find  them  totidem 
verbis,  nor  totidem  syllabis,  I  dare  engage  we  shall  make  them  out,  tertio 
modo,  or  totidem  Uteris.  This  discovery  was  also  highly  commended, 
upon  which  they  fell  once  more  to  the  scrutiny,  and  picked  out 
S,H,0,U,L,D,E,R;  when  the  same  planet,  enemy  to  their  repose,  had 
wonderfully  contrived,  that  a  K  was  not  to  be  found.  Here  was  a 
weighty  difficulty!  but  the  distinguishing  brother,  for  whom  we  shall 
hereafter  find  a  name,  now  his  hand  was  m,  proved  by  a  very  good 
argument,  that  K  was  a  modern,  illegitimate  letter,  unknown  to  the 
learned  ages,  nor  anywhere  to  be  found  in  ancient  manuscripts. 
Upon  this  all  farther  difficulty  vanished;  shoulder-knots  were  made 
clearly  out  to  be  -jure  patemo  :  and  our  three  gentlemen  swaggered 
with  as  large  and  as  flaunting  ones  as  the  best." 
The  scope  of  the  tale,  however,  widens  much  beyond  sectarian 
controversy,  and  strikes  at  abuses  generally^  both  in  and  out  of 
reUgion.  In  one  respect  it  overshot  its  mark,  bringing  upon  its 
author  the  suspicion  of  being  hostile  to  all  religion,  and  standing 
therefore  in  the  way  of  his  advancement  in  the  Church. 

The  Argument  against  Abolishing  Christianity,  which  he 
published  in  1708,  is  another  religious  satire,  and  an  excellent 
example  of  Swift's  method.  Where  a  less  subtle  irony  would 
probably  have  brought  forward  .some  obviously  ridiculous  argu- 
ments jor  abolishing  Christianity,  Swift  nimbly  turns  about  and 
takes  the  side  he  really  espoused,  but  takes  it  in  mock  humility. 
The  coolness  with  which  he  assumes  that  Christianity  is  all  but 
abolished  already,  yet  holds  that  there  are  a  few  reasons  for 
retaining  it  a  little  longer,  among  them  the  opportunity  which 
it  affords  its  enemies  to  display  their  wit  and  distinguish  them- 
selves, and  his  modest  disclaimer  that  even  he  would  not  be 
understood  as  pleading  for  the  real  Christianity  of  old  times, 
his  sarcasm  thus  hitting  hollow  Christians  as  Avell  as  infidels, 
are  among  the  most  admirable  things  in  the  history  of  contro- 
versy.    Swift's  own  religion,  it  may  be  said,  was  genuine,  but 


174  EARLY   EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

wholly  practical,  and  not  inconsistent    with    much    that    was 
coarse  and  even  degrading. 

During  the  early  years  of  the  century,  the  years  of  his  great- 
est activity  and  influence,  Swift  was  more  or  less   in   England. 

In  his  political  attitude  he  gradually  shifted  from  the 
^^^^''^^''^''^  Whig  to  the  Tory  side,  the  tenets  of  the  lattc^r  party 

according  more  with  his  religious  leanings;  and  when 
the  Tories  came  into  power  in  1710,  he  found  himself  firmly 
established  in  the  favor  of  the  ministry.  He  used  his  influence 
on  behalf  of  rising  authors  like  Steele  and  Pope;  he  contributed 
political  essays  to  the  Tory  organ,  The  Examiner,  which  were 
answered  by  Addison  (with  whom,  however  he  retained  friend- 
shij))  in  the  Whig  Examiner,  and  he  wrote  a  vigorous  article,  The 
Conduct  of  the  Allies  (1711),  against  the  continental  war  under 
Marlborough's  generalship  which  the  Whigs  were  still  supporting. 
But  the  downfall  of  the  Tories  at  the  death  of  Anne  in  1714 
put  an  end  to  this  period,  and  he  retired  to  Ireland,  practically, 
as  it  turned  out,  for  the  rest  of  his  life. 

About  this  time  occurred  his  marriage  (if  it  ever  really  took 
place)  to  "Stella" — one  Esther  Johnson,  a  young  woman  whom 

he  met  in  the  household  of  Temple,  and  for  whom  he 
Later  jjj^^^i  ]^^pi  f^j.  some  years  a  private  Journal,  which  is 

<(i-.  77-     .     now  among  the  most  interesting  of  his  literary  re- 

Gulhver  H  ,  "  .  "  .  *'   . 

Travels."  mains.  He  made  himself  very  popular  with  the  Irish 
by  his  Dra/pier  ft  Letlerfi  (1724),  in  which  he  exposed 
and  defeated  a  corrupt  political  scheme  to  wring  profit  from  the 
Irish  \)ooT.  His  Modest  Propo.ml  (1720)  for  eating  children  at 
the  age  of  one  year  to  prevent  tlunii  from  becoming  a  burden  to 
their  parents,  was  a  grimly  ironical  paper  likewise  inspired  by 
Ireland's  wrongs.  Of  much  wider  significance  was  his  Gulliver'. t 
Travels,  published  in  1720,  a  book,  like  Bunyan's  Pilgrim's 
Progress,  of  enormous  popularity.  There  must  be  few  readers 
who  have  not  in  childhood  followed  Captain  I^emuel  on  his  mar- 
vellous voyages  to  the  pygmy-land  of  Lilliput,  the  giant-land  of 
Brobdingnag,  the  pedant-land  of  Laputa,  and  the  land  of  the 


SWIFT  175 

humane  Houyhnhnms  and  tlie  bestial  Yahoos.  But  the  unhke- 
ness  of  tliis  earthly  allegory  to  Bunyan's  spiritual  visions 
is  as  great  as  could  well  be  imagined.  Under  a  thin  dis- 
guise it  portrays  human  society  as  Swift  conceived  it,  in  all 
its  pettiness  and  baseness,  its  know-nothing  science,  its  do- 
nothing  curiosity,  its  capering  and  creeping  for  courtly  favor, 
its  foolish  Big-endian  and  Little-endian  wars.  It  is  the  acme 
of  Swiftian  humor  and  satire,  dressed  in  a  garb  that  assured  its 
rece})tion  by  all  classes  of  readers.  After  this  Swift  Avrote  little 
of  the  first  importance.  His  declining  years  were  passed  in 
bitterness  and  the  shadow  of  insanity.  Stella  died  in  1728. 
His  own  death  came,  after  prolonged  agony,  in  1745. 

Swift's  verse,  consisting  almost  entirely  of  trifles,  does  not 
call  for  separate  consideration.     The  works  which  have  been 

mentioned  and  in  which  his  fame  lives,  are  all  in 
^,        ,         prose,  and  their  general  character  may  be  gathered 

from  the  particular  descriptions  given.  They  are  like 
the  man.  Sometimes  they  seem  to  be  purely  the  product  of 
whim,  the  work  of  one  who  loved  a  practical  joke,  as  when  Swift 
prophesied  the  death  of  Partridge,  the  almanac-maker,  and  then 
coolly  maintained,  in  the  face  of  denial,  that  the  prophecy  had 
been  fulfilled.  On  the  other  hand,  the  underlying  and  intense 
seriousness  of  most  of  his  work  is  not  to  be  doubted.  The  chief 
difficulty  in  understanding  his  satire  lies  in  the  fact  that  it 
is  a  double-edged  sword,  cutting  all  ways.  A  defect  that  we 
could  wish  away  is  his  frequent  coarseness.  The  coarseness 
is  less  astonishing  when  we  consider  the  tone  of  the  age,  yet 
there  was  serious  perversion  in  a  mind  that  could  contemplate 
with  satisfaction  and  sometimes  apparent  delight  such  repulsive 
images.  This  feature,  however,  we  can  escape;  his  ingrained  jies- 
simism  we  cannot.  Swift's  work  has  not  the  flush  of  health, 
because  it  moves  in  the  shade;  even  the  sunshine  of  its  humor 
is  without  warmth.  We  may,  or  may  not,  call  this  a  defect, 
according  to  our  personal  temper  and  need.  The  simple  fact 
must  be  recorded,  that  Swift  saw  the  ugliness  and  not  the  beauty 


176  EARLY  EIGHTEENTH   CENTURY 

of  humanity,  and  that  he  spent  his  energies  in  laying  that  ugliness 
bare.  Yet  over  against  this  we  must  set  the  always  massive  sub 
stance  of  his  thought,  intellectually  bracing  beyond  that  of  almost 
any  other  English  writer,  and  not  perhaps  without  a  healthy 
moral  reaction.  To  his  credit  we  remembei,  too.  that  he  did 
what  he  did  in  entire  sincerity,  and  without  a  single  bid  for  the 
literary  fame  he  won.  Imaginative  as  his  work  is,  it  is  almost 
barren  of  ornament.  Of  the  minor  rhetorical  figures  there  is 
hardly  a  trace.  There  is  little  enrichment  by  allusion  little 
borrowing  of  either  images  or  ideas.  All  is  original,  direct, 
incisive,  the  quintessence  of  the  wit  that  was  the  es.sence  of 
the  man. 

In  connection  with  Swift,  mention  has  been  made  of  a 
particular  kind  of  literature  that  is  invariably  a.ssociated  with 

the  age  of  Queen  Anne, — the  periodical  essay. 
The  Period-  Periodicals,  as  newspape;rs,  had  been  in  existence 
ical  Essay,    for  nearly  a  century;  and  the  essay,  as  a  literary 

form,  was  of  course  familiar.  But  the  combination 
of  the  two  was  a  novelty;  and  it  speedily  became,  after  its  suc- 
ce.s.sful  establishment,  an  important  organ  for  the  dissemination 
of  the  social  ideas  of  the  time.*  The  credit  for  the  a(;tual  origin 
of  the  periodical  essay  is  commonly  assigned  to  Defoe,  who 
established  and  carried  on  The  Review  from  1704  to  1713;  but 
its  final  character  and  place  in  literature;  were  unquestionably 
given  it  by  Steele  and  Addison,  two  names  that  are  as  iaseparably 
united  in  literary  history  as  those  of  Wyatt  and  Surrey,  or  Beau- 
mont and  Fletcher. 

Steele,  who  was  two  months  the  elder,  was  of  Dublin  birth, 
of  mixed  English  and  Irish  parentage,  and  early  orphaned. 
He  was  educated  at  the  Charterhouse  and  at  Oxford,  which  he 
left  without  taking  a  degree,  and  spent  most  of    his    life    in 

♦  • '  Periodicals  were  the  fashion,  most  of  them  very  short-Uved.  A  period- 
ical sheet  was  started  to  vent  an  opinion  that,  In  the  present  day,  would  be  ex- 
pressed In  a  letter,  or  a  series  of  letters,  to  a  daily  newspaper;  and  expired 
either  when  the  author  had  exhausted  the  idea,  or  when  the  public  had  received 
enough  and  refused  to  i>urchase  more."— Wm.  Mlnto. 


STEELE  177 

Loiidou.  He  was  ten  years  in  the  army,  as  cadet,  ensign,  and 
captain,  but  probably  saw  no  active  service;  his  pen  had  more  to 
do  with  his  promotions  than  his  sword.  His  position 
Richard  ^^^  j^j^^  disposition  contributed  to  make  him  what  he 
Steele 
jf'yg^joq     ^^'^^'  ^  S^y  "^*"  about  town,  a  frequenter  of  the  coffee 

houses,  Avith  a  httle  of  the  nature  of  the  profligate 
and  the  drunkard  and  a  great  deal  of  the  spendthrift,  dependent 
on  his  commissions  and  pensions  and  his  wife's  bounty,  paying 
hi's  debts  by  the  easy  method  of  contracting  others,  now  in  high 
favor  and  now  in  disgrace,  but  always  good  natured,  and  liked 
by  even  his  political  enemies. 

It  seems  a  little  odd  to  record,  as  the  first  book  of  such  a 
man,  a  religious  essay.  The  Christian  Hero  (1701).  More  in 
keeping  were  three  comedies  that  followed.  The  Funeral  (1701), 
The  Lying  Lover  (1703),  and  The  Tender  Husband  (1705), 
which,  light  as  they  are,  yet  played  a  part  in  raising  the  morals 
of  the  stage  and  substituting  the  comedy  of  sentiment  for 
that  of  brutal  licentiousness.  His  more  significant  work^  the 
essays,  began  when  in  1709  he  established  The  Tatler,  a  Whig 
penny  tri-weekly,  to  which  both  Swift  and  Addison  contributed. 
For  himself,  as  editor  and  major  contributor,  he  assumed  the 
name  of  Isaac  Bickerstaff,  which  Swift  had  used  and  made  popu- 
lar in  the  Partridge  almanac  episode.  The  rise  of  the  Tories  in 
1711  put  an  end  to  the  Tatler,  very  fortunately  for  literature,  for 
the  immortal  Spectator  rose  in  its  stead.  This  was  the  joint  en- 
terprise of  Steele  and  Addison,  It  was  published  daily  for  nearly 
two  years  (March  1711  to  December  1712,  revived  1714),  each 
number  consisting  of  a  single  sheet  and  containing  a  single  sketch 
or  essay.  Differing  from  its  forerunners  in  being  non-political, 
choosing  its  topics  from  a  wide  variety  of  interests,  serving  social 
life  and  literature  at  the  same  time,  it  rose  at  once  to  popularity 
and  that  position  of  eminence  which  it  has  ever  since  held  among 
the  great  number  of  its  contemporaries  and  successors.  It  was 
Steele  who  sketched  the  Spectator  Club  in  No.  2;  and  of  the 
total  number  of  555  papers  he  contributed  230.     The  Guardian, 


178  EARLY   EIGHTEENTH   CENTURY 

which  was  mainly  Steele's  enterprise,  followed  in  1713.  Then, 
the  next  year,  the  Whigs  returned  to  power  with  the  Hanoverian 
succession,  and  Steele  re-entered  poUtical  life  as  Swift  went  out 
of  it.  He  was  even  knighted  and  elected  a  member  of  Parlia- 
ment. But  though  he  still  wrote,  among  other  things  his  fourth 
and  best  comedy,  The  Conm'ions  Lovers  (1722),  his  most  valuable 
literary  service  was  at  an  end.  He  died  at  his  wife's  estate  in 
Wales,  aged  fifty-seven. 

The  events  of  the  quiet  and  scholarly  Addison's  life  may  be 
set  down  yet  more  briefly.     The  son  of  a  divine  with  a  living  in 

Wiltshire,  he  was  himself  intended  for  the  Church; 

Joseph  jgy^  after  his  education,  obtained  at  the  same  time  as 

,, '     '       Steele's,   at    the    Charterhouse  and  Oxford,   court 

friends,  with  whom  he  became  acquainted  through 
Dryden  and  Congreve,  secured  him  a  travelling  pension  that  he 
might  fit  himself  for  diplomacy.  He  spent  four  years  on  the  con- 
tinent, studying  the  languages,  observing,  and  writing;  and  on 
his  return  became  a  member  of  the  famous  Whig  "  Kit-Cat  Club" 
(see  Spectator,  No.  9).  He  was  commissioned  to  write  a  poem 
on  the  great  victory  of  the  Allies  at  Blenheim,  and  produced  The 
Cavipaign  (1704),  containing  the  celebrated  couplets  on  Marl- 
borough, who 

"Inspir'd  repuls'd  battalions  to  engage, 
And  taught  the  doubtful  battle  where  to  rage." 

It  may  almost  be  said  of  the  simile  which  immediately  follows  these 
lines,  the  simile  of  the  calm  angel  who  "Rides  in  the  whirlwind 
and  directs  the  storm,"  that  it  made  Addison's  contemporary 
fame;  but  of  his  poetic  product,  for  the  most  part  mediocre,  pos- 
terity has  cared  more  for  several  devotional  hymns,  especially 
the  one  beginning,  "The  spacious  firmament  on  high." 

Official  positions  succeeded,  and  Addison  lived  thenceforth 
the  not  very  eventful  life  of  a  public  servant  who  was  virtually  a 
pensioned  man  of  letters.  From  1708  onward  he  sat  in  Parlia- 
ment; but  he  was  a  silent  member,  preferring  to  exercise  his  talent 
for  speech  in  a  conversational  way  among  the  disciples  whom  he 


ADDISON  179 

gathered  about  him  at  Button's  coffee  house,  much  as  Dryden 
had  done  before  at  Will's.  He  had  most  literary  leisure  and  in- 
centive while  the  Whigs  were  out  of  power,  from  1710  to  1714. 
It  was  then  that  he  joined  Steele,  to  whose  Tatler  he  had  already 
been  a  contributor,  in  issuing  the  Spectator.  His  contributions  to 
the  latter  numbered  somewhat  more  than  Steele's;  of  the  famous 
Sir  Roger  de  Coverley  papers  in  particular  he  wrote  considerably 
the  larger  number.  He  also  contributed  to  the  later  Guardian 
and  the  revived  Spectator;  and  he  composed  a  tragedy,  Cato, 
which  was  very  successfully  acted  in  1713.  Several  years  later 
he  married  the  Countess  of  Warwick  and  retired  on  a  pension. 
He  died  in  1719,  at  the  age  of  forty-seven,  and  was  buried  in 
Westminster  Abbey.  As  a  man,  he  seems  to  have  been  modest, 
kind-hearted,  upright,  and  forbearing;  not  so  whole-souled  and 
generous  as  his  friend  Steele,  but  without  most  of  Steele's  many 
shortcomings;  less  lovable,  doubtless,  but  distinctly  more  ad- 
mirable. 

The  Spectator,  we  have  said,  was  a  great  miscellany.  There 
were  only  such  restrictions  as  the  editors  chose  to  place  upon 
themselves,  as,  for  instance,  in  the  matter  of  political 
„  .  „  opinions,  and  of  course  the  restrictions  of  space  and 
timeliness.  The  purpose  of  entertainment  was 
naturally  best  served  by  varying  the  topic  from  day  to  day,  giving 
now  a  character  sketch,  now  a  bit  of  criticism,  now  a  pleasant 
fable,  and  now  a  sugared  sermon  for  the  week's  end.  Sometimes 
a  topic  was  resumed  in  a  later  number,  and  by  reassembling  the 
numbers  we  may  get  several  fairly  connected  series,  such  as  the 
papers  upon  Paradise  Lost,  or  the  Roger  de  Coverley  sketches. 
Very  trivial  many  of  the  subjects  seem — lightness,  indeed,  was 
specifically  aimed  at — and  we  hear  a  great  deal  of  "sparks"  and 
"toasts"  and  "clubs"  and  fashionable  "routs."  But  beneath 
the  levity  there  was  a  serious  purpose,  which  is  best  stated  by 
the  Spectator  himself:— 

"Having  thus  takon  my  resolutions,  to  march  on  boldly  in  tho 
cautic  of  virtue  and  good  .sense,  and  to  annoy  their  adversaries  in  what- 


180  EARLY   EIGHTEENTH   CENTURY 

ever  degree  or  rank  uf  men  they  may  be  found,  I  shall  be  deaf  for  the 
future  to  all  the  remonstrances  that  shall  be  made  to  me  on  this  ac- 
count. If  Punch  grows  extravagant,  I  shall  reprimand  him  very 
freely;  if  the  stage  becomes  a  nursery  of  folly  and  impertinence,  I  shall 
not  be  afraid  to  animadvert  upon  it.  In  short,  if  I  meet  with  anything 
in  city,  court,  or  country,  that  shocks  modesty  or  good  manners,  I 
shall  use  my  utmost  endeavors  to  make  an  example  of  it.  I  must 
however  intreat  every  particular  person  who  does  me  the  honor  to  be 
a  reader  of  this  paper,  never  to  think  himself,  or  any  one  of  his  friends 
or  enemies,  aimed  at  in  what  is  said :  for  I  promise  him  never  to  draw 
a  faulty  character  which  does  not  fit  at  least  a  thousand  people:  or  to 
publish  a  single  j)upcr  that  is  not  written  in  the  spirit  of  benevolence, 
and  with  a  love  to  mankind." — No.  o4. 

In  conformity  with  this  purpose  we  may  expect  to  find  again 
and  again  such  sentiments  as,  "I  love  to  see  a  man  zealous  in  a 
goofl  matter,  and  especially  when  his  zeal  shows  itself  for  advanc- 
ing morality,  and  promoting  the  happiness  of  mankind,"  or  "A 
man  who  uses  his  best  endeavors  to  live  according  to  the  dictates 
of  virtue  and  right  reason,  has  two  perpetual  sources  of  cheerful- 
ness." These  were  the  genuine  and  consistent  principles  of 
Addison,  in  whose  papers  they  are  found.  Of  this  practical 
morality,  of  this  wholesome  respect  for  reasonable  social  order 
and  the  conventions  that  support  it,  a  spirit  carrying  with  it  a 
certain  distrust  of  anything  like  individual  freedom  and  enthu- 
siasm, perhaps  no  better  illustration  could  be  cited  than  the 
"Fable  of  Menippus"  (No.  391),  in  which,  after  satirizing  the 
prayers  which  men,  in  the  variety  of  their  wishes,  offer  to  Heaven, 
the  moralist  concludes  with  this  defence  of  the  ritual  of  the  Estab- 
lished Church:  "Among  other  reasons  for  set  forms  of  prayer, 
I  have  often  thought  it  a  very  good  one,  that  by  this  means  the 
folly  and  extravagance  of  men's  desires  may  be  kept  within  due 
bounds,  and  not  break  out  in  absurd  and  ridiculous  petitions  on 
so  great  and  solemn  an  occasion."  The  essays  actually  helped 
to  make  decorous  living  fashionable,  proving  an  invaluable 
antidote  for  the  moral  laxity  and  frivolity  which  had  been  trans- 
mitted from  the  preceding  generation. 


ADDISON  "  181 

It  is  to  be  noted,  too,  that  the  essays  uneonseiously  preserved 
for  posterity  a  faithful  and  vivid  picture  of  their  age.  What 
Pepys  did,  though  more  narrowly,  in  his  day,  and  Boswell  later 
in  his,  what  the  comic  dramatists,  with  some  false  emphasis, 
were  doing,  and  what  the  novelists  are  doing  at  the  present  time, 
Addison  and  his  gToup  did  for  the  society  of  Queen  Anne.  We 
think  we  know  the  manners  and  ideals  of  the  day  almost  as  if  Ave 
had  been  born  to  them.  This  is  doubtless  the  great  service  of 
the  Spectator  essays  to  readers — it  is  mainly  what  they  are  read 
for.  But  literature  owes  them  still  other  debts.  In  the  first 
place,  they  perfected  the  development  of  that  species  of  literary 
delineation  known  as  the  "Character,"  which,  as  it  came  to  be 
less  of  a  set  portrait,  was  to  })lay  immediately  into  the  hands  of 
the  novelists.  And,  in  the  second  place,  they  left  the  legacy  of 
a  finished  and  tractable  style.  For  their  style  is  admirably  in 
keeping  with  their  spirit — light,  graceful,  correct,  refined.  Hu- 
mor is  always  present  to  lighten  the  sermon  or  take  the  sting 
from  the  satire.  There  is  no  boisterous  merriment,  as  there 
is  no  heat  of  anger.  The  bounds  of  decorum  are  carefully  ob- 
served. Now  and  then  may  come  a  passage  of  heightened  color 
or  richer  tone,  as,  for  example,  in  "The  Vision  of  Mirza,"  but 
there  is  nothing  to  be  compared  with  the  soaring  eloquence  of 
Milton  or  the  oppressive  splendor  of  Browne.  It  is  simply  the 
regulated  prose  of  Dryden  with  the  added  touch  of  Augustan 
elegance  that  makes  the  style  of  our  classic  age.  This  polisheJ 
instrument  two  centuries  have  adapted  to  their  varying  needs. 

The  respective  parts  of  Steele  and  Addison  in  this  work  can 
be  determined  with  sufficient  accuracy.  There  were  other  con- 
tributors of  Avhom  we  have  made  no  mention,  the  unfortunate 
Budgell,  for  instance,  Addison's  cousin,  and  the  youthful  Pope; 
but  their  share  may  be  ignored.  Addison  and  Steele  were  the 
mind  and  soul  of  the  enterprise,  and  they  worked  in  such  har- 
mony and  kept  so  close  to  a  standard  which  sought  to  level  dis- 
tinctions, that  they  might  at  first  glance  seem  indistinguishable. 
Yet  the  fundamental   difference  of  their  natures   is  revealed. 


182  KARI-Y    EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

What  Stt'«l(>  originated  and  stimulated,  Addison  developed 
and  perfeeted.  Steele  approaehed  his  work  with  the  fresh 
ness  of  a  first  impulse,  Addison  with  the  sobriety  of  second 
thoughts.  Steele  was  too  much  absorbed  in  the  activities  and 
pleasures  of  life  to  be  an  ideal  spectator  or  a  "  correct "  writer.  We 
might  call  him  the  humanist,  in  the  natural  sense  of  the  word. 
Addi.son  was  rather  the  scholar  anil  the  artist.  We  may  like  the 
effusiveness  of  Steele,  his  tenderness  toward  women,  his  freedom 
from  cvnicism,  even  the  faults  of  his  unguarded  style.  But  we 
must  concede  to  Ad<lison  the  larger  share  of  credit  both  on  moral 
and  literary  groiuids.  Addison  was  the  consistent  ceasor  of 
manners  and  morals;  it  was  Addison  who  enriched  his  lucubra- 
tions with  the  stores  of  learning;  to  him  belongs  in  all  its  essen- 
tial features  that  really  great  creation,  Sir  Roger;  and  his  was 
the  perfection  of  that  "middle"  style,  "familiar  but  not  coarse, 
and  elegant  but  not  ostentatious,"  which  Doctor  Johnson,  in  his 
Lives  of  the  Poets,  so  emphatically  commended. 

It  would  scarcely  have  been  surprising  had  the  time  brought 
forth  no  important  poetry.     As  a  matter  of  fact  there  was  a  brief 

interregnum  after  the  death  of  Dryden,  marked 
^      '  almost  solely  by  the  graceful  "society  verse"  of  Mat- 

Yoi'imj.         thew  Prior  (1664-1721),  and  Addison's  Campaign, 

which  poem,  however,  Addison  failed  to  follow  up 
worthily,  A  little  later,  John  Gay  (1685-1732)  appeared  with 
his  burlesque  pastoral.  The  Shepherd's  Week  (1713),  and  his 
clever  town-poem.  Trivia  (1716),  to  be  followed  by  his  once 
famous  Fables  (1727)  and  Beggar's  Opera  (1728).  In  the  last 
named  occurs  the  Avell-known  song, 

"  How  happy  could  I  be  with  either, 
Were  t'other  dear  Charmer  away! 
But  while  you  thus  tease  me  together, 
To  neither  a  word  will  I  say. ' ' 

At  the  same  time,  Edward  Young  (1683-1765),  a  poet  of  very 
different  type,  was  wooing  fame  from  the  obscurity  of  an  Oxford 
fellowship  with  gloomy  religious  heroics, — tragedies,  satires,  and 


POPE  183 

odes, — to  be  rewarded  at  last  when  lie  produced  his  ponderous 
and  equally  gloomy  but  majestic  and  harmonious  blank  verse 
poem,  Night  Thoughts  (1742-*1744),  beginning  with  the  memo- 
rable line, 

"Tir'd  Nature's  sweet  restorer,  bahny  sleep!" 
Young,  however,  on  the  one  hand  so  harks  back  to  Milton,  and 
on  the  t)ther  (with  a  junior  contemporary,  James  Thomson)  so 
looks  forward  to  the  romanticism  of  a  later  generation,  within 
hailing  distance  of  which  his  years  almost  brought  him,  that  he 
seems  scarcely  to  have  been  a  poet  of  his  own  classical  age. 

Yet  the  age  was  not  to  be  without  its  poet,  and  even  when 
the  Spectator  was  taking  London  by  storm,  young  Alexander 

Pope,  for  whom  the  age  is  sometimes  named,  was 
Alexander  rapidly  making  his  way  into  the  place  vacated  by 
mlfi-i7AA     I^O'*^^"-     Personally  Pope  was  a  most  unpromising 

contestant  for  the  laurels  of  Apollo.  A  fine  eye  and 
a  melodious  voice  were  all  that  he  had  to  offset  a  body  that  was 
sickly,  dwarfish,  and  deformed;  he  could  scarcely  dress  and 
undress  himself.  Born  in  London,  the  son  of  a  Roman  Catholic 
linen-draper,  he  was  brought  up  some  miles  distant,  on  the 
borders  of  Windsor  Forest.  His  education  was  irregular^ — for  an 
English  University  career  was  not  open  to  Catholics^ — but  the 
development  of  his  literary  talent  was  early  and  rapid.  He 
was  introduced  to  town  life  by  the  dramatist  Wycherley,  came 
to  know  Addison  and  his  circle,  and  later,  as  a  member  of  the 
Scriblerus  Club,  Swift,  Gay,  and  others.  But  owing  to  his  frail 
constitution,  his  relations  with  these  men  were  more  literary  than 
social.  Debarred  from  politics  and  patronage,  he  kept  close  to 
his  country  life,  and  in  1718,  enriched  by  his  translation  of 
Homer,  leased  a  house  at  Twickenham  on  the  banks  of  the 
Thames.  There,  in  accordance  with  the  prevalent  passion  for 
landscape  gardening,  he  laid  out  his  little  five  acres  into  artificial 
mounts  and  shaven  greens,  grotto,  orangery,  grove,  and  even 
"wilderness."  The  grotto — a  tunnel  beneath  a  roadway^ — was 
famous  for  its  ornaments  of  shells  and  natural  curiosities.     This 


184  EARLY   KIGHTEENTII   CENTL'UY 

was  Pope's  home  to  his  death,  his  shelter  from  the  Hterary  storms 
which  his  satirical  and  too  often  malicious  pen  constantly  brought 
upon  him.  For  of  his  personal  character  not  much  can  be  said 
to  his  credit.  The  open  vices  of  Steele  seem  pardonable  by  the 
side  of  the  petty  spiteful  ncss  of  Pope.  Perhaps  allowance  may 
be  made  on  the  ground  that  his  mental  and  moral  nature  was 
warped  by  his  physical  ills. 

His  first  publication  consisted  of  four  Pastorals  (1709),  cor- 
responding to  the  four  seasons.  They  were  composed,  he  said, 
at  the  age  of  sixteen.  They  are  an  imitation  of  Virgil's  Eclogues, 
wTitten  in  very  correct  heroic  couplets,  and  full  of  classical 
machinery;  nymphs  and  swains  pipe  and  dance  on  the  shores  of 
the  Thames;  a  milk-white  bull  is  sacrificed  to  Phoebus;  the 
showers  descend  from  the  Pleiads;  sultry  Sirius  burns  the  thirsty 
plains.  In  short  they  are  an  excellent  illustration  of  the  fact 
that  so-called  pastoral  poetry,  which,  to  be  true  to  its  name, 
should  be  the  most  simple  and  natural  of  verse,  had  come  to  be 
well-nigh  the  most  artificial.  Another  of  his  early  poems, 
Windsor  Forest  (published  in  1713,  but  written  much  earlier), 
which  has  sometimes  been  praised  for  containing  real  touches 
of  nature,  shows  the  same  admixture  of  conventionalism; 
the  "bright-ey'd  perch"  have  "fins  of  Tyrian  dye,"  and  "blush- 
ing P'lora  paints  th'  enamell'd  ground."  The  Essay  on  Criticism 
(1711)  is  a  didactic  poem,  likewise  in  heroics,  full  of  rules  and 
precepts  for  poetry,  such  as 

"Be  not  the  first  by  whom  the  new  are  tried, 
Nor  yet  the  last  to  lay  the  old  aside," 

many  of  which  have  been  quoted  thousands  of  times.  This 
poem  drew  the  attention  and  won  the  favorable  opinion  of  Ad- 
dison. Shortly  after  this  he  published  The  Rape  of  the  Lock 
(1712,  extended  1714).  This  was  a  brilliant  mock  heroic  poem, 
written  to  turn  to  a  laugh,  and  so  allay,  a  quarrel  that  had  arisen 
between  two  families  because  a  young  lord  had  sportively  cut  off 
a  lock  of  a  young  lady's  hair.  That  it  quite  effected  this  object 
we  cannot  be  certain;  but  through  its  satiric  portrayal  of  the 


POPE  185 

fashionable  life  of  the  day  it  achieved  a  wide  populai*  and  critical 
success,  and  it  remains  one  of  the  poet's  very  best  works. 

Then  Pope,  who  had  long  been  trying  his  hand  at  all  sorts 
of  translatfons,  imitations,  and  paraphrases,  was  urged  by  Swift 
and  others  to  translate  Homer.  A  special  incentive  was  found 
in  liberal  advance  subscriptions,  for  the  work  was  designed  to  be 
published  in  a  number  of  sumptuous  volumes.  He  spent  seven 
years  on  the  Iliad,  and  the  six  volumes  of  that  work  appeared 
from  1715  to  1720.  In  five  years  more,  the  Odyssey  was  com- 
pleted, with  the  help  of  two  other  translators.  Apart  from  the 
literary  value  of  this  work,  which  will  be  discussed  below,  it  is 
significant  as  marking  a  new  era  in  the  history  of  English  letters, 
the  era  of  public  instead  of  private  patronage.  Henceforth,  a 
writer  of  talent  might  depend  upon  his  readers  for  remuneration, 
and  not  upon  a  pension  or  the  gift  of  some  wealthy  sponsor  who, 
out  of  a  real  admiration  for  literature,  or  merely  to  gratify  his  per- 
sonal pride,  chose  to  pose  as  a  patron  of  it.  Pope  received  for 
his  Homer  nearly  £10,000.  His  gibes  at  the  half-starved  scrib- 
blers of  Grub  Street  came  with  a  very  ill  grace  from  a  man  whom 
the  public  treated  so  handsomely. 

Free,  at  length,  for  more  purely  original  work,  he  turned 
again  to  the  field  of  satiric  and  didactic  verse  which  he  had  pre- 
empted a  dozen  years  before.  The  first  fruit  of  his  new  endeav- 
ors was  The  Dunciad  (1728).  Since  Dryden's  great  success, 
it  had  been  quite  the  fashion  to  satirize  literary  dulness,  and 
Swift's  Scriblerus  Club  had  been  formed  with  the  express  pur- 
pose of  carrying  on  burlesque  war  against  the  hacks  and  poet- 
a.sters.  Swift  had  proposed  to  Pope  that  he  should  employ  his 
skill  in  a  general  satire,  and  the  final  outcome  was  the  Dunciad. 
But  the  Dunciad  is  not  general.  Pope  selected  his  objects  with 
little  attempt  at  concealment  and  struck  straight  and  hard.  Xot 
only  the  incompetent  scribblers  and  bardlings,  but  every  man 
against  whom  he  had  a  real  or  fancied  grievance — publishers 
with  whom  he  had  quarrelled,  dramatists  who  had  borrowed 
his  lines  without  credit — came  in  for  a  touch  of  his  venomous 


186  EARLY  EIGHTEENTH    CEXTURY 

spite  or  scathing  scorn.  The  poem  might  live  by  its  virulence 
alone  if  it  had  no  less  dubious  merits.  The  principal  object 
of  his  attack  was  Colley  Gibber  a  dramatist  and  actor  of  the 
Theatre  Royal,  and  later  Poet  Laureate,  whom  the  goddess 
of  Dulness  is  made  to  appoint  Poet  Laureate  of  her  realm: — 

"She  ceased.     Then  swells  the  chapel-royal  throat; 
'God  save  King  Gibber!'  mounts  in  every  note. 
Familiar  White's  'God  save  King  Colley!'  cries; 
'God  save  King  Colley!'  Drury-lane  replies. 
To  Nccdham's  quick  the  voice  triumphal  rode 
But  pious  Needham  dropp'd  the  name  of  God; 
Back  to  the  Devil  the  last  echoes  roll, 
And  'Coll!'  each  butcher  roars  at  Hockley-hole. 
So  when  Jove's  block  descended  from  on  high 
(As  sings  thy  great  forefather  Ogilby) 
Loud  thunder  to  its  bottom  shook  the  bog, 
And  the  hoarse  nation  croak'd  'God  save  King  Log!'  " 

After  this,  Pope  was  for  some  time  kept  busy  defending  him- 
self and  altering  the  poem  to  suit  his  purpose.  Then,  through 
practically  the  remainder  of  his  life,  he  was  engaged  upon  a 
succession  of  Epistles,  Moral  Essays,  and  Satires.  The  most 
ambitious  was  the  Essay  on  Man  (1732-1734),  long  regarded 
as  a  great  philosopliical  poem,  and  certainly  a  triumphant 
example  of  Pope's  peculiar  powers.  It  versified  many  of  the 
philosophical  fragments  of  Bolingbroke,  aiming  to  set  forth 
the  principles  of  Deism,  a  kind  of  natural  religion  then  current, 
and  one  of  the  approaches  to  that  infidelity  which  Swift  had 
satirized  in  his  Argument  against  Abolishing  Christianity. 
As  philosophy,  however,  it  is  not  remarkable;  and  there  are 
those  to-day  who  will  scarcely  admit  it  under  their  definition 
of  poetry.  But  it  spread  Pope's  fame  to  many  nations,  being 
translated  even  into  such  languages  as  Portuguese  and  Polish, 
where  English  poetry  has  seldom  gone.  Of  his  other  poems 
of  this  period,  the  Epistle  to  Dr.  Arhuthnot  (1735)  contains  the 
famous  "character  of  Atticus,"  which  had  been  written  many 
years  before,  and  in  which  Pope  had  attempted  to  satisfy  a 


POPE  187 

grudge  he  bore  against  Addison,  denouncing  him  as  one  who 
knew  well  how  to 

"Damn  with  faint  praise,  assent  with  civil  leer, 
And  without  sneering,  teach  the  rest  to  sneer." 

In  all  these  husy  years — for  though  Pope  did  not  live  to  a 

great  age  he  began  his  work  early — he  had  made  himself  the  final 

master  of  the  heroic  couplet  in  its  changed  form,  the 
Estimate  of    ..  i  •   i     nr  n       i  T         i         i      ■ 

his  Work      lorni  which  Waller  began  to  use  nearly  a  hundred 

years  before  and  which  grew  to  power  in  the  hands 
of  Dryden.  Pope  aimed  from  the  first  at  a  "correctness"  that 
should  exceed  anything  yet  reached  in  English  poetry,  and,  in 
accordance  with  his  own  ideals,  he  attained  it.  He  made  the 
couplet  more  precise  than  ever,  more  conformable  to  fixed  laws, 
even  wholly  discarding  in  his  later  work  both  triplets  and  Alex- 
andrines. He  took  this  single  instrument,  pointed  and  polished 
it  like  a  rapier,  and  went  forth  with  the  air  of  a  conqueror. 
And  so  admirably  was  the  instrument  suited,  not  only  to  his 
own  purpose,  but  to  the  temper  of  the  age,  that  he  fixed  for  his 
century  a  poetic  fashion  which  nothing  short  of  a  revolution 
in  ideals  could  avail  to  change. 

Apart  from  this  mastery  of  form,  Pope's  fame  rests  almost 
equally  on  the  two  main  divisions  of  his  work,  the  translation  of 
Homer,  and  the  satiric-didactic  pieces.  His  success  in  the 
former  was  of  a  peculiar  kind.  He  knew  little  Greek  and  was 
compelled  to  work  through  other  translations.  Moreover,  his 
neat  little  couplet  was  as  far  removed  from  the  ample  sweep  of 
Homer's  lines  as  can  well  be  imagined.  The  fact  is,  he  did  not 
succeed  in  translating  Homer,  as  every  scholar  since  Bentley 
has  clearly  discerned.  The  directness  and  simplicity  of  the 
original  are  lost.  For  nature  there  is  convention,  for  eloquence 
there  is  rhetoric,  for  passion  there  is  j)oint.  The  bright  moon 
is  made  into  the  "refulgent  lamp  of  night,"  lambs  are  a  "fleecy 
care,"  flying  arrows  are  "feather'd  fates,"  the  temple  of  Pallas 
is  the  "high  Palladian  dome."  When  Hecuba  ^oes  "down  to 
her  fragrant  chamber,"  Pope  writes: — 


188  EARLY   EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

"The  Phrygian  queen  to  her  rich  wardrobe  went, 
Where  treasur'd  odors  breath'd  a  costly  scent." 

Homer's  Priam  asks  to  "take  his  fill  of  sweet  sleep."  Pope's 
Priam  prays: — 

"  Permit  mc  now,  belov'd  of  Jove,  to  steep 
My  raroful  temples  in  the  dew  of  sleep." 

Homer's  Hector  is  fated  "to  glut  fleet-footed  dogs  in  the  dwelling 
of  a  violent  man."     Pope's  Hector  stands 

"Doom'd  from  the  hour  his  luckless  life  begun, 
To  dogs,  to  vultures,  and  to  Peleus'  son!" 

Yet  out  of  the  framework  and  story  which  Homer  provided. 
Pope  produced  a  great  poem,  perhaps  the  greatest  single  poen. 
i)f  his  century.  His  own  and  succeeding  generations  read  it  with 
intense  delight,  not  asking  themselves  whether  it  faithfully  re- 
produced Homer,  but  satisfied  to  feel  that  it  was  spirited  in 
action  and  characters,  noble  in  sentiment,  and  faultless  in  form. 
It  comes,  indeed,  about  to  this — that  for  English  readers  there 
are  two  Homers  instead  of  one;  and  if  we  will  take  the  second 
for  what  it  is,  and  not  complain  because  it  is  not  the  first,  we 
shall  be  able  to  perceive  its  really  original  merits.  As  thorough 
a  romanticist  as  Ruskin  in  the  nineteenth  century  could  acknowl- 
edge his  great  debt  to  this  eighteenth  century  classic. 

The  virtue  of  Pope's  other  poems  lies  not  so  much  in  their 
.significance  as  wholes,  as  in  the  perfection  of  a  hundred  detach- 
able parts.  The  Rape  of  the  Lock  is  an  admirable  single  poem, 
almost  the  only  one  that  can  boast  complete,  artistic  unity, 
and  it  has  some  admirable  long  passages,  like  the  description  of 
Belinda's  toilet  at  the  end  of  the  first  canto,  or  the  game  of  Ombre 
in  the  third.  But  even  in  this,  the  parts  are  better  than  the 
whole;  while  in  almost  all  his  other  poems  the  things  we  remem- 
ber are  the  scores  of  lines  and  couplets,  each  of  which  has 
caught  up  some  fact  of  life,  or  precept  of  morality,  and  expressed 
it  so  aptly  and  smoothly  that  it  is  as  it  were  minted  into  a  coin 
current  for  all  time: — 


POPE  189 

"To  err  is  human,  to  forgive  divine." 

"  Know  then  thyself,  presume  not  God  to  scan ; 
The  proper  study  of  mankind  is  man." 

"Honor  and  shame  from  no  condition  rise: 
Act  well  your  part;  there  all  the  honor  lies." 

Only  Shakespeare,  of  English  poets,  is  more  quotable  or  more 
often  quoted,  than  Pope.  This  is  not  originality,  but  it  is  the 
next  best  thing — this  ability  to  clarify  and  adorn  the  ideas  of 
more  original  minds  and  .so  make  them  common  property.  And 
this  was  Pope's  special  gift,  so  perfect  in  its  kind  that  he  may  well 
contest  with  his  friend  and  mentor,  the  far  more  original  Swift, 
the  position  of  leading  spirit  of  the  age. 

Now  with  the  work  of  these  men  before  us,  especially  the 
prose  of  Addison  and  the  poetry  of  Pope,  we  are  in  a  position  to 
understand  what  is  meant  by  the  "Classicism"  of  the  age.  It 
does  not  mean  that  there  was  genuine  enthusiasm  for  classical 
scholarship;  that  belonged  rather  to  the  age  of  the  Renaissance. 
But  there  was  great  admiration  for  the  particular  ideals  of 
Roman  literature  in  the  time  of  Augustus — for  rhetorical  polish 
and  refinement.  The  Epistles  and  Satires  of  Horace  were 
especially  regarded  as  models.  French  influence  also  was  strong, 
for  men  like  La  Fontaine,  Boileau,  and  the  dramatists,  had 
already  fixed  a  similar  character  upon  French  literature.  The 
pleasure  which  was  taken  in  making  prose  correct  and  orderly 
was  extended  to  poetry,  and  every  species  of  lawlessness  was 
decried.  Homer,  Chaucer,  Shakespeare,  and  Milton  had  all  to 
be  remodelled  to  suit  the  changed  taste.  In  short,  artificiality, 
in  literature  as  in  .social  life,  was  the  keynote.  There  was  nmch 
talk  of  nature.  "True  wit  is  nature  to  advantage  dress'd"  was 
one  of  Pope's  maxims.  But  in  the  first  place,  this  "nature" 
meant  specifically  the  manners  of  life  as  they  were  found;  and 
then  the  dressing  to  advantage  left  little  even  in  those  that  could 
be  called  natural.     Imagination  was  dead,  and  a  nimble  fancy. 


190  EARLY  EIGHTEENTH   CENTURY 

a  sharpened  logic,  and  a  cunning  art,  took  its  place.  The  depths 
of  human  emotion  were  left  unsounded,  the  glories  and  mysteries 
of  outdoor  nature  unexplored.  Poets  were  content  to  find  their 
themes  in  the  trivial  concerns  of  a  frivolous  society  or  the  com- 
monplaces of  a  self-satisfied  philosophy.  In  the  Rape  of  the 
Lock,  for  instance,  cards  are  called,  and — 

"Behold,  four  Kings  in  majesty  revered, 
With  hoary  whiskers  and  a  forky  beard." 

Coffee  is  served,  and — 

"  From  silver  spouts  the  grateful  liquors  glide, 
While  China's  earth  receives  the  smoking  tide." 

The  lock  is  cut  from  the  fair  one's  head,  and — 

"What  Time  would  spare,  from  steel  receives  its  date, 
And  monuments,  like  men,  submit  to  fate! 
Steel  could  the  labor  of  the  gods  destroy. 
And  strike  to  dust  th'  imperial  towers  of  Troy ; 
Steel  could  the  works  of  mortal  pride  confound, 
And  hew  triumphal  arches  to  the  ground. 
What  wonder,  then,  fair  nymph!  thy  hairs  should  feel 
The  conquering  force  of  unresisted  steel?" 

To  such  uses  had  the  heroics  of  Chaucer  and  Marlowe  come. 
The  gulf  that  separates  not  only  these  verses  from  the  lightest 
of  Shakespeare's  or  Milton's,  but  equally  the  highest  reaches  of 
their  author  from  the  sublime  imaginings  of  the  men  who  had 
gone  before,  cannot  be  measured.  Yet  we  may  spare  ridicule; 
indeed  ridicule  for  the  matter  no  sooner  threatens  to  rise  than 
admiration  for  the  unsurpassed  art  of  the  manner  thrusts  it  back. 
Pity,  moreover^  were  out  of  place.  Each  age  has  its  work  to 
perform ;  and,  thanks  to  Swift,  Addison,  Pope,  and  their  fellows 
the  Classical  Age  of  English  literature  need  yield  to  no  other  in 
the  effectiveness  with  which  it  performed  its  special  task. 


SA.MUEL  UlC'IIA.KUSO>|- 


I^A>VRENCK   STKKNE 

IIenhy  Fikldinc; 


CHAPTER  XIV 

EIGHTEENTH   CENTURY — RISE   OF  THE   NOVEL 

1720-1770 

DEFOE     RICHARDSON     FIELXUN'G     SMOLLETT     STEBNE 

* 

To  the  eighteenth  century  belongs  the  development  of  a 
virtually  new  species  of  literature  which  has  since  grown  to  be 
one  of  the  strongest  competitors  of  poetry  and  the  drama.  It 
is  what  we  know  to-day  as  the  Novel,  employing  a  term  which 
did  not  come  into  very  general  English  use  until  some  time  after 
the  thing  itself.*  It  is  to  be  carefully  distinguished  from  the 
older  Romance.  The  latter  term  was  long  applied  to  any  narra- 
tive of  adventure  or  love,  usually  in  verse,  and  commonly  a 
translation  from  one  of  the  Romance  languages;  and  the  ele- 
ment of  adventure  remains  to  this  day  one  of  the  conspicuous 
features  of  the  prose  romance.  "The  Novel,"  wrote  Clara 
Reeve  in  her  Progress  of  Romance  (1785),  "is  a  picture  of  real 
life  and  manners,  and  of  the  time  in  which  it  is  written.  The 
Romance,  in  lofty  and  elevated  language,  describes  what  never 
happened  nor  is  likely  to  happen."  Of  course  the  kinds  are 
bound  to  overlap,  and  a  sort  of  cross  between  the  two  may  be 
seen  in  the  Spanish  picaresque  or  rogue  stories,  which  are  fre- 
quently full  of  wild  adventures  against  a  background  of  the 
sheerest  realism.  But  something  more  is  required  of  the  novel. 
The  picaresque  tale  itself  lacks  the  very  essential  elements  of 
plot,  and  of  character  as  revealed  in  and  developed  by  plot.     It 

*In  Elizabethan  times  the  word  was  applied  to  short  realistic  tales,  com- 
raonly  translated  from  the  Italian  (Italian,  novella).  The  eighteenth  century 
novelists,  Richardson,  Fielding,  etc.,  preferred  to  call  their  novels  "Histories." 

101 


192  EIGHTEENTH   CENTURY 

is  the  uddition  of  these  elements  and  their  combination  into  a 
coherent  and  artistic  narrative  of  seemingly  real  life  that  con- 
stitute the  true  novel,  and  this  was  scarcely  to  be  found  until 
the  century  of  which  we  now  write. 

The  general  histon-  of  prose  fiction,  extending  from  the 
tales  in  ancient  Greek  and  Roman  literature  through  the  abun- 
dant Italian  and  Spanish  romances  of  the  fourteenth  and  fif- 
teenth centuries  down  to  the  almost  simultaneous  rise,  in  Ger- 
many, France,  and  England,  of  the  novel  proper,  cannot  be 
traced  here.  Confining  ourselves  to  English  literature,  we  may 
note  that  only  some  half  dozen  works  have  thus  far  been  men- 
tioned which  may  properly  come  .under  the  general  name 
of  prose  fiction.  The  earliest  of  them  belong  to  the  time  of 
C'axton  and  Malory,  the  others  to  the  Elizabethan  age,  Mal- 
ory's great  work,  we  have  seen,  is  specifically  a  romance,  but 
a  romance  on  so  large  a  scale,  with  such  a  heroic,  legendary, 
and  even  superhuman  background,  that  it  may  with  almost 
equal  propriety  be  called  a  prose  epic.  The  Elizabethan 
romances  are  different,  Sidney's  Arcadia  and  Lodge's  Rosalynde 
are  both  pastoral  in  character.  Lyly's  Euphues  is  harder  to 
define;  a  handbook  of  social  morals  and  manners,  with  a  thin 
plot,  it  may  be  said  to  approach  the  character  of  a  novel, 
though  still  far  from  corresponding  exactly  to  our  modern  idea 
of  this  form.  The  seventeenth  century  did  not  add  much 
beyond  some  very  artificial  romances  of  chivalry  and  some 
wretched  "rogue"  stories.  Toward  the  end,  indeed,  appeared 
Mrs,  Behn's  popular  Orocmoko  and  The  Fair  Jilt  (1688),  which 
may  by  courtesy  be  named  novels,  if  perchance  they  find  any 
readers  to-day  to  name  them  at  all.  And  there  was  one  seven- 
teenth century  book,  already  discussed  in  this  history,  though 
not  under  the  name  of  a  romance,  which  must  not  be  over- 
looked. In  intent,  of  course.  The  Pilgrim's  Progress  is  an  en- 
tirely earnest  religious  allegory;  yet  many  of  its  thousands  of 
readers  read  it  with  little  thought  that  it  is  anything  but  an 


RISE  OF  THE  NOVEL  193 

entertaining  story.  Half  dramatic,  half  narrative  in  method,* 
it  presents  both  characters  and  something  of  a  plot,  and  has 
thus  two  of  the  vital  elements  named  above. 

At  the  beginning,  however,  of  the  eighteenth  century,  came, 
from  a  more  conscious  literary  source,  a  most  direct  contribution. 
This  is  the  character-sketch  as  it  culminated  in  the  hands  of  the 
essayists.  The  "Character"  was  a  species  of  literary  portrait 
much  affected  in  the  seventeenth  century.  It  is  the  description  of 
a  general  type  only,t  not  unlike  one  of  Jonson's  t\^es  of  "Hu- 
mours." The  essayists,  especially  Addison  and  Steele,  first  gave 
such  "Characters"  personal  names,  and  breathed  into  them  the 
breath  of  individual  life,  with  the  result  best  seen  in  the  realistic 
portraits  of  the  Spectator  Club.  In  achieving  lifeUkeness,  in- 
deed, their  success  was  greater  than  that  of  Bunyan,  who  had 
approached  the  same  thing  from  another  point  of  view.  In 
The  Pilgrinis  Progress  the  illusion  of  reality  is  not  quite  com- 
plete. Even  the  reader  who  scarcely  suspects  allegory,  feels 
this.  The  journey  which  Christian  makes,  by  however  realistic 
quagmires  and  valleys  and  hills,  is  yet  a  dream-journey  to  some 
mystic  goal;  and  Christian  and  his  companions  are  in  so  far 
removed  from  the  actual  world.  Not  such  is  Sir  Roger  de  Cov- 
erley.  He  is  a  man  of  our  own  kind;  his  flesh  and  blood  are  fed 
with  English  beef  and  ale;  we  could  take  him  familiarly  by  the 
hand  and  talk  with  him  about  his  gray  pad  and  his  poultry  and 
his  stop-hounds.  In  short,  he  is  all  ready  to  step  into  a  perfected 

•••Honest  John,  "says  Benjamin  Franklin  in  his  ^MtofitograpAy,  "was  the 
first  that  I  know  of  who  mixed  narrative  and  dialogue."  Of  course  Bunyan 
was  not  the  first— the  method  is  common  to  nearly  all  the  romances  mentioned 
above— but  his  example  at  this  time  no  doubt  counted  for  more  than  the 
others.  See  also  what  was  said  (p.  159)  about  Bunyan's  Life  and  Death  of  Mr. 
Badman. 

t  Sir  Thomas  Overbury,  for  instance,  hit  off  the  country  gentleman  as 
one  whose  "  travel  is  seldom  farther  than  the  next  market  town,  and  his  inqui- 
sition is  about  the  price  of  corn:  when  he  travelleth,  he  will  go  ten  mile  out  of 
the  way  to  a  cousin's  house  of  his  to  save  charges;  and  rewards  the  servants 
by  taking  them  by  the  hand  when  he  departs."  So  of  the  proud  man:  "He 
never  salutes  tirst."  Of  the  covetous  man:  •'He  never  spends  candle  but  at 
Christmas  (when  he  has  them  for  New  Year's  gifts)  in  hope  that  his  servants 
will  break  glasses  for  want  of  a  light,  which  they  double  pay  for  in  their  wages. ' 


194  EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

novel,  as  he  seems  to  have  stepped  out  of  one.  Just  what,  then, 
was  needed  to  create  that  novel,  is  now  plain.  Had  Bunyan 
foregone  allegory'  and  a  visionary  framework,  or  had  Addison 
introduced  a  connected  narrative  of  plot,  the  novel  would  have 
been  born.  As  it  was,  its  actual  birth  was  delayed  another  gen- 
eration. Meanwhile,  the  author  of  Gulliver's  Traveh  and  the 
author  of  Robinson  Crusoe  were  also  anticipating  the  event.  Of 
Swift  we  have  spoken ;  Defoe  must  have  place  here. 

The  life  of  Defoe  is  veiled  in  obscurity.     We  know  that  he 

was  the  son  of  a  butcher,  and,  for  a  while,  himself  a  tradesman, 

and    that    he    afterward    served    the   army,    jour- 

Daniel  nalism,     and   politics    in    turn.     He    was    several 

,f:„  '   „.     times  prosecuted  for  libel  and  treason.     A  satirical 

lfj-')9—l/Jl.  ' 

pamphlet  against  the  high-churchmen  got  him 
into  prison,  while  a  political  ballad  made  him  at  the  same 
time  a  popular  hero.  Intrigue  and  dissembling  seemed  part 
of  his  nature;  he  even  conducted  a  professedly  Tory  journal 
in  the  secret  pay  of  the  Whig  government.  Through  all  his 
vicissitudes  he  remained  essentially  a  man  of  the  common 
people,  and  possibly  cherished  at  heart  the  rough  morality  and 
piety  which  they  are  wont  to  practice  and  which  he  could  preach 
so  effectively  at  need.  He  died,  apparently,  a  homeless  wan- 
derer. 

By  the  sheer  industry  of  his  restless  pen,  plied,  to  all  seem- 
ing, without  joy  or  ambition,  Defoe  produced  above  two  hun- 
dred and  fifty  works.  They  fall  easily  into  two  classes — a  mis- 
cellaneous class  of  practical,  satirical,  and  political  pieces,  and 
works  of  fiction.  The  first  of  these  extends  from  an  Essay  on 
Projects  in  1G98  and  a  hoaxing  pamphlet  on  The  Shortest  Way 
with  the  Dissenters  in  1702  through  a  long  succession  of  ephem- 
eral tracts.  During  his  imprisonment  he  started  The  Review 
(1704),  which  has  already  been  mentioned  as  a  forerunner  of 
the  Tatler  and  Spectator,  and  which  he  continued  to  issue  for 
nearly  ten  years.  The  service  of  these  writings  was  to  journal- 
ism rather  than  to  literature  proper. 


DEFOE  195 

It  is  very  different  with  the  works  of  fiction.  The  most  impor- 
tant of  them,  all  written  when  Defoe  was  nearly  or  quite  sixty 
years  of  age,  are,  to  name  them  in  order,  Robinson  Crusoe  (1719), 
Captain  Singleton  (1720)^  Moll  Flanders,  Journal  of  the  Plague 
Year,  Colonel  Jack  (1722),  Roxana  (1724).  It  may  seem  strange 
to  class  a  work  entitled  Journal  of  the  Plague  Year  as  fiction;  it 
will  seem  still  more  strange  to  one  who  reads,  without  enlighten- 
ment, that  wonderful  history.  Details  are  set  down  with  all  the 
statistical  minuteness  of  facts;  descriptions  are  as  vivid  as  an 
eye-witness  could  make  them;  there  is  little  attempt  at  method, 
and  positively  no  attempt  at  color  or  the  adornments  of  fine 
writing.  It  never  enters  the  reader's  mind  that  an  effect  is 
sought;  the  sole  object  seems  to  be  to  convey  the  bare  truth  of 
history,  to  report  things  as  they  were.  Yet  Defoe  was  scarcely 
six  years  old  when  the  plague  swept  London.  Something  his 
book  may  owe  to  memory,  and  much,  of  course,  to  records  and 
the  relations  of  others,  but  the  Journal,  "written  by  a  citizen 
who  continued  all  the  while  in  London,"  and  "never  made 
public  before,"  is  nevertheless  not  the  truthful  history  it  appears. 
Defoe's  especial  gift  was,  as  has  well  been  said,  to  "lie  like  truth," 
and  the  Journal  is  essentially  a  work  of  realistic  fiction.  Such 
more  obviously,  are  the  other  works  named.  They  are 
mostly  rogue  stories  of  the  Spanish  picaresque  t;ype,  setting 
forth  circumstantial  biographies  of  imaginary  heroes  in  the  wild 
or  low  life  that  Defoe  knew  so  well.  Captain  Singleton  is  a 
pirate  of  the  African  coast ;  Moll  Flanders  is  a  Newgate  thief  and 
outcast  who  is  transported  to  Virginia;  Colonel  Jack  is  a  pick- 
pocket. The  method  was  one  which  Defoe  employed  throughout 
his  journalistic  career.  Upon  the  death  or  sudden  notoriety  of 
any  person  of  mark,  whether  it  were  Peter  the  Great  of  Rus- 
sia or  Jonathan  Wild  the  highwayman,  he  was  ready  with  a 
"Life"  or  "Memoir"  which  the  public  would  be  eager  to  read, 
and  in  which  the  semblance  of  truth  was  unblushingly  made  to 
serve  for  the  truth  itself.  It  was  quite  as  easy  to  furnish  out  an 
inijiginary  character  with  a  siniilarl}'  interesting  life  and  adven- 


196  EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY  ' 

tures.     Ungurnishcd  verisimilitude  was  invariably  the  keynote. 
An  example  may  he  taken  at  random  from  almost  any  page: — 

'Nothing  could  be  more  perplexing  than  this  money  was  to  me 
all  that  night.  I  carried  it  in  my  hand  a  good  while,  for  it  was  in  gold, 
all  but  14s.;  and  that  is  to  say,  it  was  in  four  guineas,  and  that  14s. 
was  more  difficult  to  carry  than  the  four  guineas.  At  last  I  sat  down 
and  pulled  off  one  of  my  shoes,  and  put  the  four  guineas  into  that ; 
but  after  I  had  gone  a  while,  my  shoe  hurt  me  so  I  could  not  go,  so  I 
was  fain  to  sit  down  again  and  takc^  it  out  of  my  shoe,  and  carry  it  In 
my  hand.  Then  I  found  a  dirty  lin;^n  rag  in  the  street,  and  I  took 
that  up  and  wrapped  it  all  together,  and  carried  it  in  that  a  good  way, 
I  have  often  since  h(!ard  people  say,  when  they  have  been  talking  of 
money  that  they  could  not  get  in,  'l  wish  I  had  it  in  a  foul  clout;' 
in  truth,  I  had  mine  in  a  foul  clout;  for  it  was  foul,  according  to  the 
letter  of  that  saying,  but  it  served  me  till  I  came  to  a  convenient  place, 
and  then  I  sat  down  and  washed  the  clout  in  the  kennel,  and  so  then 
put  my  money  in  again." — Colonel  Jack. 

It  was  in  pursuit  of  the  same  method  tha.i  Robinson  Ci-usoe,  the 
first  and  for  the  present  generation  almost  the  only  one  of  Defoe's 
works  of  fiction,  came  into  being,  Alexander  Selkirk,  a  Scotch 
sailor,  had  spent  four  years  in  solitary  self-exile  on  the  island  of 
Juan  Fernandez.  He  returned  to  London,  and  his  story  got 
abroad.  Then  Defoe  put  forth  the  fascinating  experiences  of  one 
Robinson  Crusoe,  a  York  mariner,  dated  the  narrative  before  Sel- 
kirk's adventure,  and  declared  that  he  believed  it  to  be  all  true. 
The  prevarication  is  of  little  consequence  now.  Schoolboy  and 
critic  alike  know  it  to  be  as  good  as  true,  and  the  art  that  makes  it 
so  is  so  nmch  the  greater.  The  book  is  a  universal  classic.  It  has 
been  praised  sometimes  for  its  pious  teaching.  This  feature, 
indeed,  is  characteristic  of  Defoe;  his  Colonel  Jack  is  never 
depicted  as  naturally  evil;  and  Moll  Flanders  dies  repentant. 
But  a  more  real  instructive  value  is  probably  found  in  the  prac- 
tical side  of  Crusoe's  character,  in  his  persistent  energy  and 
boundless  resourcefulness,  through  which  he  exemplifies  in  his 
own  life  much  of  the  history  of  human  progress  from  uncouth 
savagery  to  the  refinements  of  civilization.  Best  of  all,  however, 
is  that  for  which  the  book  is  oftenest  read — the  seemingly  artless 


RICHARDSOX  197 

story  itself,  tlie  fascinating  tale  of  actual  life  under  unusual  yet 
entirely  natural  circumstances.  The  longevity  of  its  fame  is 
beyond  conjecture. 

Whether  or  not  this  was  the  first  deliberate  and  full-grown 
English  novel  is  a  matter  of  definition.  There  are  tho.se  who 
would  call  Robinson  Crusoe  a  novel  of  incident,  though  not  a 
novel  of  character.  In  the  delineation  of  character  Defoe  had 
little  skill.  Incidents  on  the  other  hand  he  employed  in  abun- 
dance, and  very  effectively.  But  they  are  loosely  strung  together; 
as  in  the  picaresque  tale,  the  only  connection  between  the  sepa- 
rate adventures  is  that  a  single  hero  experiences  them.  In  other 
words,  there  is  virtually  no  plot;  and  if  plot  and  character  are 
essential  to  the  novel,  as  in  a  strict  definition  they  certainly  are, 
Defoe's  stories  cannot  be  called  novels.  His  one  great  contribu- 
tion, we  have  seen,  was  his  painstaking  realistic  method — the 
thing  which  makes  it  difficult  to  call  his  works  by  the  old  name 
of  romance.  It  must  not  be  understood  that  realism  is  essential 
to  all  novels;  certainly  such  minutely  circumstantial  realism  as 
Defoe's  is  not.  But  it  afforded  the  most  perfect  basis  for  the 
construction  of  plots  and  the  portrayal  of  characters  which 
should  be  intimately  correlated  as  in  life;  and  when  all  these 
met,  the  precise  thing  we  now  call  a  novel  was  unquestion- 
ably evolved.  Such  a  meeting  is  to  be  found  in  the  first  novel 
of  Samuel  Richardson. 

Richardson  followed  Defoe  by  thirty  years,  and  like  him 

was  past  fifty  when  he  began  to  write  fiction.     Unlike  Defoe, 

however,  he  had  written  nothing  before  except  love- 

„ .  ,     J         letters  which  as  a  Derbyshire  country  boy  he  had 
Richardson,  .  ,  .        .  ^       j 

1H89-1761     composed  for  the  girls  of  his  neighborhood.     He  was 

simply  a  succes.sful  London  printer  and  stationer, 

who  had  attained  to  plumpness,  fussiness,  and  a  fondness  for  tea, 

when  a  publisher  asked  him  to  prepare  a  volume  of  Familiar 

Letters  which  might  serve  as  a  kind  of  model  letter-writer  for  the 

illiterate.     Richardson  did  this  and  more  besides;  he  conceived 

the  idea  of  weaving  into  a  series  of  similar  letters  a  story,  at 


198  Eir.nTKi'A'rn  ckntukv 

the  same  tiiiu'  pointing  a  moral  for  the  frivolous  or  thoughtless 
serving  maids  who  would  he  likely  to  read  such  a  book. 
The  result  was  the  somewhat  crude  novel,  Pamela,  or  Virtue 
Rewarded  (1740).  The  heroine  is  a  humble  girl  who  by  the 
exercise  of  steadfast  virtue  finally  accomplishes  marriage  with 
her  master  and  persecutor.  The  success  of  the  novel  was  so 
marked,  extending  outside  of  England  to  the  continent,  that  it 
was  followed  by  a  better  and  much  more  elaborate  book,  in  seven 
volumes,  (Uarissa,  or  the  History  of  a  Young  Lady  (1748).  The 
heroine  of  this,  Clarissa  Harlowe,  moves,  from  the  outset,  on  the 
middle-class  social  level  to  which  Pamela  Andrews  attains  in  the 
end.  She  suffers  a  very  similar  persecution  at  the  hands  of  the 
artful  villain  Lovelace,  only  the  situations  are  more  complicated, 
the  characters  more  complex,  and  the  end  tragic.  Richardson's 
third  and  last  novel.  Sir  Charles  Grandison  (1753),  touched  upon 
aristocratic  life,  and  attempted  to  set  forth  the  author's  idea  of 
a  perfect  gentleman. 

All  these  novels  are  written  in  the  form  of  letters  passing 
between  the  characters;  if  the  author  comes  forward  with  expla- 
nations or  comments,  it  is  only  in  foot-notes.  All  of  them  have 
a  fairly  well  defined  plot — a  conclusion  which  is  clearly  foreseen 
by  the  writer  and  patiently  and  consistently  worked  up  to.  All 
of  them  portray  character  both  as  influencing  action  and  as  in- 
fluenced by  it.  All  employ  a  minute  and  even  tedious  realism 
in  setting  forth  conditions  just  as  they  were  in  English  life.  All 
are  permeated  with  sentimentalism,  and  all  are  primarily  con- 
cerned with  enforcing  an  ideal  of  manners  that  grew  naturally 
in  an  age  which  made  so  much  of  manners, — or  an  ideal  of  de- 
portment, we  may  better  say,  since  manners  were  coming  to  be 
more  and  more  complicated  with  graver  questions  of  morality. 
Prolix  as  they  seem  to-day,  and  to  the  average  person  almost 
unreadable,  they  exercised  a  tremendous  power  over  contempo- 
rary readers;  nor  can  we  deny  to  them  qualities  of  universal  and 
enduring  interest.  Richardson  had  a  genuine  sympathy  with 
his  characters,  and  he  had  a  real  genius  for  analyzing  the  senti- 


FIELDING  199 

ments  of  the  human,  especially  the  female,  heart.  Alfred  de 
Musset  went  so  far  in  his  enthusiasm  as  to  call  Clarissa  Harlotce 
the  best  novel  in  the  world.  Saner  is  the  judgment  of  Carlyle, 
who  declares  that  in  the  single  ability  to  see  things,  itself,  how- 
ever, no  very  high  excellence,  Defoe  and  Richardson  may  rank 
not  far  below  Homer. 

There  were  those,  nevertheless,  who  did  not  regard  Richard- 
son's work  favorably,  among  them  one  who,  setting  out  as  Rich- 
ardson's satirist,  ended  by  becoming  his  compeer  and 
Henry  jj^  some  respects  his  superior.    This  was  Henry  Field- 

,^*^^  ^.£-' ,     ing.     Fielding  came  of  a  family  of  rank  in  the  south- 

170/— 1754.  . 

western  counties,  was  educated  at  Eton  and  at  Ley- 
den,  and  led  a  somewhat  irregular  life  in  London,  intending  for 
the  law  and  becoming  finally  a  magistrate,  but  more  attracted 
at  first  to  writing  for  the  stage.  He  had  produced  a  number  of 
comedies,  satires,  and  essays  of  an  indifferent  quality  when 
Richardson's  Pamela  was  published,  and  its  character  and  popu- 
larity immediately  excited  his  contempt.  Robustly  masculine 
himself  and  a  thorough  man  of  the  world,  he  had  little  liking  for 
Richardson's  sentimental  letter-budgets  with  their  feminine 
standards  of  propriety  and  their  very  doubtful  if  well-intended 
morality.  He  regarded  their  author  as  somewhat  of  a  prig;  he 
felt  that  human  beings  are  compact  of  good  and  evil  inscrutably 
intertwined;  and  he  knew  that  to  virtue  and  vice,  rewards  and 
punishments  are  not  distributed  upon  any  worldly  basis  nor  in 
any  calculable  proportions.  He  took  for  nominal  hero,  there- 
fore, a  brother  of  Pamela  Andrews,  represented  him  in  the  service 
of  a  designing  mistress,  and  began,  as  a  burlesque,  The  History 
of  Joseph  Andrews.  He  became  so  interested,  however,  that 
almost  before  he  was  aware,  he  had  written  a  long  novel  with  few 
burlesque  features.  It  was  published  in  1742,  and  accepted  at 
once  upon  its  own  merits.  Though  crude  in  some  respects,  like 
the  work  which  inspired  it,  it  excelled  that  in  its  admirable  comic 
spirit,  and  portrayed  in  the  simple-hearted,  eccentric  Parson 
.\dams,  its  real  hero,  a  character  that  deserves  unstinted  praise. 


200  EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

Fielding's  next  work  of  fiction,  Jonathan  Wild  the  Great 
(1743),  was  a  mock  biography  intended  wholly  as  a  satire.  He 
wrote  but  two  more  genuine  novels  before  the  failure  of  his 
health  and  the  sad  voyage  to  Lisbon,  where  he  died  at  the  age  of 
forty-seven.  The  History  of  Tom  Jones  was  published  in  1749, 
Amelia  in  1751.  The  former,  which  contains  the  admirable 
portrait  of  Squire  Western,  is  unquestionably  his  best  work — 
one  of  the  classics,  indeed,  of  fiction.  It  is  composed  in  the  more 
ordinary  narrative  style,  without  Richardson's  epistolary  ma- 
chinery. The  author,  however,  is  lavish  of  comment,  constantly 
coming  forward  for  a  chat  with  the  reader  upon  the  course  of 
his  story  or  upon  the  conduct  of  life. 

"As  we  determined,  when  we  first  sat  down  to  write  this  history, 
to  flatter  no  man,  but  to  guide  our  pen  throughout  by  the  directions 
of  truth,  wc  arc  obHged  to  bring  our  hero  on  the  stage  in  a  much  more 
disadvantageous  manner  than  we  could  wish ;  and  to  declare  honestly, 
even  at  his  first  appearance,  that  it  was  the  universal  opinion  of  Mr. 
Allworthy's  family  that  he  was  certainly  born  to  be  hanged." — Book 
III.,  chapter  ii. 

Tom  Jones  is  a  "  foundling"  of  no  very  remarkable  qualities, 
a  healthy  animal  who  goes  through  life  not  seriously  troubled 
with  scruples  of  conscience,  and  who,  it  must  be  confessed,  comes 
out  in  the  end  much  better  than  he  deserves.  The  plot,  though 
good,  is  by  no  means  perfect,  the  adventures  are  sometimes  forced, 
the  scenes  are  often  offensive  to  our  taste,  and  the  moral  effect  is 
open  to  question.  But  the  novel  has  a  dozen  merits,  not  the 
least  of  which  is  that  it  is  essentially  and  undeniably  true  to 
life.  That  the  life  is  comparatively  low  is  an  accident;  the  book 
is  none  the  less  human  because  it  cannot  be  a  universal  human 
comedy.  Apart  from  its  sordidne.ss,  the  realism  is  of  the  best  kind. 
Richardson  often  dej)ends  for  lifelikeness  on  a  multitude  of  petty 
details ;  Fielding  keeps  to  the  larger  outlines  and  draws  with  a  surer 
hand.  Richardson's  characters,  hanging  for  days  on  punctilios 
of  conduct,  are  such  slaves  to  motives  and  to  the  author's  moral 
purpose  that,  though  convincingly  real  in  their  separate  acts. 


SMOLLETT  201 

they  leave  a  total  impression  verging  on  caricature;  Fielding's  are 
free  and  impulsive,  and  constantly  guilty  of  inconsistencies  in 
action,  which,  as  being  neither  more  nor  less  than  human,  the 
author  is  not  concerned  either  to  explain  or  defend.  Of  Fielding, 
therefore,  it  may  safely  be  said  that,  whether  the  EngUsh  novel 
was  actually  created  by  Richardson  or  Defoe  or  still  earher,  it 
attained  in  his  hands  the  form  and  character  which  has  been  the 
ideal  of  the  best  novelists  since.  Mr.  Saintsbury  declares  that  in 
the  "practical  recreation  and  presentation  of  life"  Fielding  first 
did  in  English  prose  (upon  the  model  of  Cervantes  in  Spanish) 
what  Shakespeare  and  others  had  done  before  him  in  poetry 
and  the  drama. 

Tobias  Smollett,  the  next  in  order  of  the  important  novelists 
of  the  period,  was  a  Scotchman  of  gentle  birth  who  began  life 
as  a  surgeon's  apprentice  and  shipped  in  the  navy 
lobias  ^g  surgeon's  mate.     After  some  rough  experiences 

.^^y  ,^1-,  at  sea  and  in  the  West  Indies,  he  settled  in  London 
and  pursued  a  literary  life  not  unlike  Fielding's, 
writing  satires,  essays,  plays,  and  novels.  His  important 
novels  are  The  Adventures  of  Roderick  Random  (1748),  for  which 
he  drew  freely  upon  his  own  career;  The  Adventures  of  Pere- 
grine Pickle  (1751);  and  a  considerably  later  and  better  one, 
written  in  letter  form.  The  Expedition  of  Humphrey  Clinker 
(1771).  The  two  first  named,  confessed  imitations  of  Le  Sage's 
Gil  Bias,  are  rather  in  the  nature  of  picaresque  talcs,  depending 
less  on  plot  than  adventure,  but  employing  the  same  intense 
realism  of  which  Defoe  was  master.  The  last,  written  while 
tiie  author  was  dying  in  Italy,  is  a  work  of  infinite  humor, 
and  one  of  the  very  best  })ictures  we  have  of  contempo- 
rary English  life  and  manners.  All  unfortunately  contain 
scenes  of  much  coarseness  and  brutality — practical  jokes,  for 
instance,  of  the  lowest  description  are  one  of  the  sources  of  inter- 
est— and  that  Thackeray  should  have  pronounced  them  "de- 
lightful" is  a  testimony  to  his  own  thorough  seasoning  in  both 
life  and  literature.     They  belong  to  their  century,  and  it  was 


202  EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

not  a  time  when  men  either  shrank  from  coarseness  and  vice, 
or  thought  that  the  way  to  condemn  it  was  to  pass  it  by.  Smol- 
lett's earlier  tales  live  chiefly  for  their  pictures  of  sea-life  and  sea- 
men, so  immeasurably  more  lifelike  than  anything  the  romancers 
were  wont  to  give;  his  Tom  Bowling,  indeed,  as  a  real  English 
tar,  leaves  Robinson  Crusoe  himself  a  shade.  That  his  last 
work,  Humphrey  Clinker,  excelled  these  in  the  kindly  human 
sympathy  w^hich  underlies  even  its  broadest  humor,  is  owing  in 
part  to  the  author's  riper  age,  but  possibly  also  in  part  to  the 
influence  of  one  whom  w^e  treat  next,  his  senior  in  years,  but 
a  tardier  competitor  for  the  novelist's  laurels, 

Laurence  Sterne,  a  wandering  soldier's  son,  and  for  the 
greater  part  of  his  life  an  obscure  country  clergyman,  wrote  two 

of  the  strangest  books  in  literature — Tristravi 
^  Shandy,  which,  published  in  parts  betw^een  1760  and 

1713-1768.     1767,  made  the  author  at  once  a  literary  lion  in  I^on- 

don,  aad  A  Sentimental  Journey  through  France  and 
Italy  (1768),  which  gave  him  a  posthumous  fame  abroad. 
The  books  are  almost  literally  indescribable.  The  first  does  not 
even  give  what  its  title  promises,  "the  life  and  opinions  of 
Tristram  Shandy."  The  hero  is  not  the  hero,  and  though  he  is 
the  narrator  he  does  not  fairly  get  himself  bom  until  the  third 
book,  in  the  middle  of  which  he  writes  his  preface.  It  is  a 
plotless  farrago  of  sense  and  nonsense,  license,  humor,  wit,  and 
wisdom,  which  becomes  a  novel,  if  it  does  so  at  all,  by  its  origi- 
nal and  vivid  portrayal  of  character.  Walter  Shandy,  the  crack- 
brained  philosopher,  Corporal  Trim,  the  Widow  Wadman,  and 
above  all  Uncle  Toby,  the  simple-minded  veteran  of  King 
William's  wars,  are  among  the  striking  portraits  that  adorn  the 
gallery  of  early  English  fiction.  The  last  named  has  been  called 
by  Sir  Leslie  Stephen  the  "incarnation  of  the  sentimentalism 
of  the  eighteenth  century."  Sentimentalism,  indeed,  is  the  most 
pervading  characteristic  of  Sterne's  work, — at  its  mawkish  worst 
repelling  his  readers,  but  at  its  best  softening  his  humor  into 
something  far  more  acceptable  than  the  ferocious  humor  of 


STERNE  203 

Smollett.  It  is  most  marked  in  the  Sentimental  Journey,  which 
is  often  preferred  to  the  larger,  more  eccentric,  and  more  Rabe- 
laisian work.  An  example  will  show  very  clearly  the  nature  of  it : — 

"We  set  off  afresh,  and  as  she  took  her  third  step,  the  girl  put  her 
hand  within  my  arm — I  was  just  bidding  her — but  she  did  it  of  herself 
with  that  undeliberating  simplicity,  which  shewed  it  was  out  of  her 
head  that  she  had  never  seen  me  before.  For  my  own  part,  I  felt  the 
conviction  of  consanguinity  so  strongly,  that  I  could  not  help  turning 
half  round  to  look  in  her  face,  and  see  if  I  could  trace  out  any  thing 
in  it  of  a  family  likeness — Tut!  said  I,  are  we  not  all  relations? 

"When  we  arrived  at  the  turning  up  of  the  Rue  de  Gueneguault, 
I  stopped  to  bid  her  adieu  for  good  and  all:  the  girl  would  thank  nic 
again  for  my  company  and  kindness — She  bid  mc  adieu  twice — I  re- 
peated it  as  often ;  and  so  cordial  was  the  parting  between  us,  that  had 
it  happened  anywhere  else,  I'm  not  sure  but  I  should  have  signed  it 
with  a  kiss  of  charity,  as  warm  and  holy  as  an  apostle. 

"But  in  Paris,  as  none  kiss  each  other  but  the  men — I  did,  what 
amounted  to  the  same  thing — 

" — I  bid  God  bless  her." 

In  this  quality  of  sentimentality  it  is  to  be  noted  that  Sterne 
stood  with  Richardson,  as  against  Swift,  Fielding,  and  Smollett. 
But  Richardson  was  no  humorist,  and  Sterne  was. 

With  the  names  of  Smollett  and  Sterne  we  may  be  content 
to  close  the  history  of  the  eighteenth  century  novel.  Two  im- 
portant works  of  fiction  have  not  yet  been  mentioned,  Rasselas 
and  The  Vicar  of  Wakefield;  but  as  they  were  the  incidental  pro- 
ductions of  men  distinguished  equally  in  other  fields,,  the  con- 
sideration of  them  falls,  with  that  of  their  authors,  in  the  suc- 
ceeding chapter.  Henry  jVIackenzie's  The  Man  of  Feeling 
(1771),  which  continued  Sterne's  sentimentalism  without  his 
humor,  may  be  quite  disregarded.  Fiction  entered  upon  a 
distinct  decline.  After  Smollett's  Humphrey  Clinker  (1771),  but 
a  single  novel  of  social  life  and  manners  attained  to  anything  like 
its  quality,  namely,  Miss  Burney's  sprightly  Evelina,  which  was 
published  in  1778.  On  the  other  hand,  romances,  though  of 
mostly  inferior  character,  came  once  more  into  vogue.  In  1764 
Horace  Walpole,  the  letter-writer,  and  builder  of  the  famous 


204  EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

"little  (Jotliic  castle"  at  Strawberry  Hill,  Twickenham,  pub- 
lished his  famous  little  "Gothic"  or  mediaeval,  romance  of  The 
Castle  of  Ofranto,  a  pretended  translation  of  a  black-letter  Italian 
original.  Enchanted  helmets,  trap-doors  and  spectres,  sighing 
[portraits  and  bleedinir  statues,  are  a  part  of  th«>  machinery  of  the 
tale,  which,  the  poet  Gray  reported,  made  him  and  his  little- 
hardened  Cambridge  friends  "afraid  to  go  to  bed  o'nights."  It 
had  a  number  of  successors,  notably  William  Beckford's  oriental 
tale  of  the  Caliph  J'ailiek  (1784),  Mrs.  Radcliffe's  Mij.,.enes  of 
Udo/plio  (1794),  and  Matthew  Gregory  I^ewis's  The  Monk 
(1790).  Finally,  the  revolutionary  social  theories  that  were 
rife  toward  the  end  of  the  century  affected  fiction  and  inspired 
tales  of  the  type  of  William  Godwin's  Caleb  Williams  (1794). 
But  though  all  these  books  Avere  extremely  popular,  none  of 
them  reached  greatness.  They  interest  us  chiefly  as  exponents 
of  the  reactionary  tendency  which,  on  the  side  of  pure  romance, 
was  in  another  century  to  culminate  in  the  positive  genius  of  the 
great  "Wizard  of  the  North."  , 


CHAPTER  XV 


MIDDLE    AND    LATE    EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY — AGE    OF    JOHNSON 
AND   BURKE— 1740-1798. 


George  II 1727-I7>i0 

Jacobite  Rebellion 1740 

British  poicer  established  in 

India. n.'u 

Accession  of  George  III 7760 

}\'ar  of  American  Independ- 
ence  7775 

Wm.  Pitt  the  Younger,  Prime 

Minister 17fi:-i 

Impeachment  of  Hastings 17H(i 

Outbreak  of  the  French  Revo- 
lution  ns;i 


JOHNSON 

GOLDSMITH 

SHERIDAN 

GIBBON 

BUBKE 

THOMSON 

COLLINS 

GRAY 

COWPEB 

CBABBE 

BLAKE 

BURNS 


Montesiinieu 
Voltaire 
Rousseau 
Bernardiu  St. 

Pierre 
Kant 
K16pstock 
Lessing 
Herder 
Goethe 
Schiller 
Franklin 


Turning  now  from  our  sketch  of  the  rise  of  the  novel,  we 
take  up  again  the  thread  of  miscellaneous  prose  and  poetry 
where  we  left  it  at  the  death  of  Swift  and  Pope.  The  political 
history  of  the  time  requires  little  comment.  The  House  of 
Hanover  was  firmly  established,  as  it  remains  to  this  day.  The 
policies  of  the  nation  were  chiefly  determined  by  her  statesmen, 
especially  Walpole  the  "Peace  Minister,"  and  Pitt  the  fiery 
"Patriot"  and  "Great  Commoner."  Under  the  former,  while 
the  country  apparently  stood  still,  the  foundations  of  free  trade 
were  laid  and  a  colonial  policy  was  shaped;  under  the  latter, 
with  Clive  extending  the  British  empire  over  India  and  Wolfe 
defending  it  in  America,  the  nation  rose  from  insularity  to  her 
modern  position  among  the  great  powers  of  the  world.  Some- 
thing of  this,  of  course,  is  in  her  literature;  but  it  is  to  be  noted 
that  through  this  period  letters  do  not  keep  so  close  to  affairs 
of  state  as  they  had  done  since  the  time  of  the  Restoration. 


206  MIDDLE   AND  LATE   EIGHTEENTH   CENTURY 

With  the  rise  of  the  Commons,  the  spread  of  culture,  and  the 
freedom  of  the  press  from  political  or  clerical  interference, 
writers  became  more  independent  of  both  Court  and  Church. 
We  have  seen  how  the  publication  of  Pope's  Homer  was  signifi- 
cant of  the  fact  that  authors  were  beginning  to  look  for  their 
rewards  less  to  noble  patrons  than  to  the  reading  public.  The 
increasing  intrusion  of  the  bourgeois  element  into  literature 
itself,  with  its  consequent  influence  on  style  and  the  whole  range 
of  mental,  moral,  and  artistic  standards,  is  exemplified  in  Defoe, 
in  Richardson,  and  above  all  in  the  novels  of  Fielding,  who  set 
forth  in  his  characters  the  average,  democratic,  unheroic  man 
as  scarcely  Shakespeare  himself  in  the  shadow  of  feudalism  cared 
to  do.  We  shall  henceforth  be  more  and  more  concerned  with 
the  aspirations  and  passions  that  throb  in  the  hearts  of  the  com- 
mon people. 

At  the  same  time  the  social  and  intellectual  ideals  of  the 
century  did  not  materially  change.  There  were,  on  the  sur- 
face at  least,  the  same  deference  to  conventionality,  the  same 
satisfaction  witii  mere  excellence  of  form,  the  same  exaltation  of 
"good  sense."  Philosophy  was  much  affected  by  the  thinking 
classes,  but  intellectual  force  decreased  with  imaginative  decline, 
and  a  rather  narrow,  specious  philosophy  was  the  guide  of  life. 
The  critical  spirit  was  still  rife.  Genius  was  understood  to 
mean  talent  or  propensity,  or,  at  the  best,  general  rather  than 
exalted  powers.  Reynolds  painted  real  portraits  instead  of 
idealized  Madonnas  or  symbolic  saints.  Garrick,  in  default  of 
any  highly  original,  creative  drama,  reinterpreted  Shakespeare 
and  Dryden.  Nor  is  it  without  significance  that  Doctor  Johnson, 
the  great  "literary  dictator,"  should  to-day  be  characterized 
l)y  dictionaries  of  biography,  not  first  as  essayist,  or  philoso- 
pher, or  poet,  all  of  which  in  some  degree  he  was,  but  as  lexico- 
grapher. The  prevalent  respect  for  well-tried  conventions,  the 
calm  submission  to  the  dictates  of  reason,  the  earnest  desire  for 
universal  law  and  order,  are  all  apparent  in  the  labors  of  this 
man,  valonnisly  working  to  regulate  into  precision  our  language, 


JSIH    .J<>!SIIl-,V    RKYNOI^IJS 
RlCIIARU    llKINSLEY  SHERIDAN 


David  Garrick 

JaMICS   BOSM'ULI' 


JOHNSON  207 

the  most  indispensable  single  instrument  of  social  well-being. 
If  Sterne  incarnated  the  sentimentalism  of  his  day,  Doctor 
Johnson  incarnated  its  conservatism  and  rational  morality,  and 
his  name  very  properly  heads  the  roll  of  middle  eighteenth  cen- 
tury writers. 

Johnson  was  the  son  of  a  Lichfield  bookseller.     His  strug- 
gles with  poverty  and  constitutional  disease  as  a  student  at 

Oxford,  as  the  unsuccessful  schoolmaster  of  "Edial 
Saimiel  Hall,"  and  as  a  miscellaneous  hack-WTiter  of  Lon- 
]~nq_iyo,     dou's  " Grub  Street"  in  one  of  the  lowest  periods 

of  English  letters,  are  all  well  known.  Still  more 
clearly  does  he  stand  out  to  us  in  the  days  of  his  later  triumph, 
when,  as  part  founder  of  the  Literary  Club  at  the  Turk's 
Head,  he  gathered  about  him  that  remarkable  group  of  diverse 
celebrities: — Garrick,  the  actor,  his  former  pupil,  who  had  come 
up  to  London  with  him;  Joshua  Reynolds,  the  painter;  Gold- 
smith, like  himself  a  struggling  and  ultimately  successful  author; 
Gibbon,  the  historian;  Burke,  the  barrister  and  politician  of 
brilliant  promise;  and  the  young  Scotchman,  James  Boswell, 
It  is  the  sole  but  very  sufficient  distinction  of  the  last-named  that 
he  became  Johnson's  biographer.  Johnson  was  one  of  the  best 
conversationalists  that  ever  lived.  His  hard  experiences  in  life 
had  been  turned  to  a  true  philosopher's  uses,  and  he  was  ready 
to  deliver  himself,  with  critical  insight  and  with  the  confidence 
of  authority,  on  all  sorts  of  subjects.  "Sir,  it  is  not  so."  "Sir, 
we  are  all  more  or  less  governed  by  interest."  "Sir,  a  man  may  be 
so  much  of  evervthing  that  he  is  nothing  of  anything."  "  Madam, 
it  is  more  from  carelessness  about  truth  than  from  intentional 
lying,  that  there  is  so  much  falsehood  in  the  world."  Boswell, 
attracted  by  the  great  man's  character  and  wisdom,  became  his 
faithful  attendant  for  a  number  of  years  and  kept  a  minute 
record  of  all  that  he  said  and  did.  There  is  perhaps  no  book 
extant  which  fulfils  more  perfectly  the  purpose  of  a  biography — 
to  present  its  subject  as  he  was  in  the  flesh — than  this  book 
of  Boswell's;  and  through  it,  and  through  Reynolds's  speaking 


208  MIDDLE   AND   LATE   EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY 

portrait,  it  has  come  about  that  the  personality  and  opinions  of 
Doctor  Johnson  are  more  familiar  to  us  than  his  written  works. 

The  works,  nevertheless,  are  of  enduring  merit.  Some  of 
them  are  in  poetic  form.  London,  a  satire  in  couplets,  was  pub- 
lished as  early  as  1738,  and  was  not  less  popular  and  not  less 
artificial  than  Pope's  satires  of  the  same  period.  The  Vanity  of 
Human  Wishes  (1749),  in  imitation  of  Juvenal,  is  of  the  same 
didactic  nature,  but  rises,  through  its  melancholy  moralizing,  to 
some  degree  of  poetic  impressiveness.  Besides  these  there  are  sev- 
eral excellent  Prologues  (one  of  which  contains  the  lines  on 
Shakespeare,  "Each  change  of  many-colored  life  he  drew"  etc.) 
and  a  forgotten  tragedy,  Irene  (1749).  The  miscellaneous 
character  of  his  prose  has  been  mentioned.  He  conducted  The 
Rambler,  1750-1752,  and  somewhat  later  The  Idler,  after  the 
conventional  periodical  plan.  The  Dictionary  also  was  the  work 
of  these  middle  years,  and  was  the  occasion  of  two  remarkable 
pieces  of  prose — the  pathetic  "Preface,"  and  the  more  than 
pathetic  "Letter"  in  which,  in  language  unapproached  for 
sincerity  and  dignified  scorn,  he  refused  the  too  tardily  offered 
assistance  of  Lord  Chesterfield,  and  sounded  the  death-knell  of 
patronage.  The  Prince  of  Abyssinia,  later  known  as  Rasselas, 
was  published  in  1759.  It  is  a  strange  compound  of  tale,  novel, 
and  moral  essay,  upon  a  theme  little  different  from  the  old  one 
of  the  vanity  of  human  wishes.  Lastly  there  are  the  well-known 
Lives  of  the  Poets,  published  1779-1781  as  prefaces  to  an  edition 
of  the  English  poets — hackwork  it  may  be,  but  hackwork  digni- 
fied and  ennobled  beyond  the  connotation  of  that  name. 

To  later  generations  the  name  of  Johnson  has  often  stood 
for  a  style — the  Latinized,  the  ponderous,  the  "sesquipedalian." 
Goldsmith  told  him  that  if  he  were  to  write  a  fable  about 
little  fishes  he  would  make  them  "talk  like  whales."  His  prose 
is  indeed  very  much  what  we  might  expect  of  a  lexicographer. 
Yet  the  buckram  of  his  diction  is  not  at  all  ill  suited  to  the  often 
stiff  texture  of  his  thought.  Moreover,  it  is  not  all  of  this  in- 
flexible cast,  neither  is  the  style  all  of  the  man. 


Thomas  CIray 
Samvei.  .Johnson 


EOMfXD   BURKB 

Oliver  Goldsmith 


GOLDSMITH  209 

"  Ye  who  listen  with  creduUty  to  the  whispers  of  fancy,  and  pur- 
sue with  eagerness  the  phantoms  of  hope;  who  expect  that  age  will 
perform  the  promises  of  youth,  and  that  the  deficiencies  of  the  present 
day  will  be  supplied  by  the  morrow, — attend  to  the  history  of  Ras- 
selas,  prince  of  Abyssinia." 

Thus  begins  Rasselafs;  and  though  the  artificial  Httle  tale  may 
seem  a  trifle  antiquated  to-day,  there  is  a  charm  about  it  that 
holds  attention  from  this  gently  melodious  opening  sentence 
to  the  close,  and  that  changing  tastes  and  standards  cannot 
wholly  superannuate.  In  the  Lives  of  the  Poets,  moreover,  not 
only  is  Johnson's  style  mellowed  by  years,  but  the  words  are  so 
weighted  with  the  wisdom  of  a  great  moralist  and  interpreter  of 
human  nature  that  we  find  ourselves  listening  to  this  alone,  un- 
conscious of  the  language  that  conveys  it.  The  last  of  the  literary 
dictators  was  worthy  of  his  lineage. 

A  striking  parallel  to  the  miscellaneous  character  of  John- 
son's writings  is  presented  by  the  product  of  Oliver  Goldsmith, 
the  man  w^ho  stood  nearest  to  the  great  dictator 
Oliver  jj^  both  friendship  and  fame.     A  less  likely  person 

*'v:.o  Y^-v/  to  attain  such  a  position  than  Goldsmith  was,  can 
1/ZO—1//4-  .  . 

scarcely  be  imagined.      A  poor  Irish  clergyman  s 

son,  he  was  a  sore  trial  to  his  parents  and  his  school-mas- 
ters, who  almost  without  exception  declared  him  a  dunce. 
When  he  was  ready  to  set  out  for  himself,  according  to  his  own 
account  he  narrowly  escaped  emigration  to  America,  where 
doubtless  he  would  never  have  been  heard  of  again.  He  drifted 
instead  to  Edinburgh  and  the  continent,  and  finally,  in  destitution, 
to  London.  Somehow,  anyhow, — for  bread  and  butter  was  his 
sole  aim,  and  that  only  when  hunger  urged, — he  fell  into  hack- 
work. Slowly  some  of  his  periodical  essays  began  to  attract  at- 
tention, especially  his  "Chinese"  satires  on  English  society,  enti- 
tled A  Citizen  of  the  World  (1760-1761).  At  this  time,  Johnson, 
who  had  preceded  him  by  twenty  years,  had  attained  to  fame  and 
a  prospective  pension  and  the  ease  of  that  armchair  where  he 
could  "fold  his  legs  and  have  out  his  talk."     Goldsmith  was 


210  MIDDLE    AND    LATE    EIGHTEENTH    CKNTLKY 

inevitablv  drawn  into  the  circle  wliich  he  was  to  help  make  im- 
mortal ;  and  from  time  to  time  he  may  be  seen  moving  across  the 
pages  of  Boswell,  shoulder  to  shoulder,  if  one  may  speak  meta- 
phoricallv,  with  the  great  philosopher.  If,  indeed,  with  his 
lumpish  little  body  and  pock-marke<l  fa(;e  he  was  more  unpre- 
iwsst^ssing  even  than  the  deformed  Pope,  nature  made  him 
ironical  amends  in  the  goodness  of  his  heart — in  a  combi- 
nation of  prudence  and  generosity  by  which  he  was  enabled 
to  make  friends  and  keep  them  and  die  in  the  end  two  thousand 
pounds  in  debt.  Gibbon  and  Burke  might  make  game  of  his 
simplicity,  but  they  loved  him  and  they  knew  his  worth;  and 
they  livefl  to  see  his  memory  honored  by  thousands  to  whom 
their  learning  and  eloquence  were  but  a  name. 

Of  his  meagre  verse,  the  four  hundred  lines  each  of  I'he  Trav- 
eller (1764)  and  The  Deserted  Village  (1770)  make  up  the  major 
portion.  The  one  is  the  meditation  of  a  wanderer,  who,  from 
an  Alpine  height,  surveys  the  world  and  concludes  that  under 
whatsoever  government  we  dwell,  "Our  own  felicity  we  make 
or  find."  The  other,  in  which  the  poet  looks  back  to  "sweet 
Auburn,"  the  half-real  scene  of  his  youth,  in  genuine  pity  for 
what  he  supposed  was  its  ruin  through  the  evils  of  landlordism, 
declares  that 

"111  fares  the  land,  to  hastening  ills  a  prey, 
Where  wealth  accumulates,  and  men  decay." 
Both  are  in  the  moralizing  strain  of  Johnson,  but  sweeter  in  their 
humanity  and  less  declamatory  in  tone.  They  do  not  rise  to  the 
level  of  the  rapt  contemplation  in  Gray's  Elegy,  but  their  dissolving 
views  of  happiness  are  more  winsome,  and  they  get  closer  than 
Crray  to  rustic  life  and  domestic  joys — almost  as  close  as  Burns. 
^Moreover,  the  classic  couplet  received  at  Goldsmith's  hands 
once  more  and  almost  for  the  last  time  the  polish  of  its  best  days, 
and  his  lines  are  therefore  often  as  quotable  as  Pope's. 

The  account  goes  that  Doctor  Johnson  was  the  agent  who 
succeeded  in  selling  the  manuscript  of  The  Vicar  of  Wakefield 
and  so  enabled  Goldsmith  at  a  critical  moment  to  pay  his  rent. 


GOLDSMITH  211 

Be  that  as  It  may,  the  story  was  pubUshed  in  1766,  to  the  very 
great  augmentation  of  Goldsmith's  fame  with  ix)sterity,  who  have 
worn  out  a  hundred  editions  of  the  work.  It  is  a  domestic  novel, 
with  a  plot  almost  as  aimless  as  the  author's  own  life;  the  sole 
object  seems  to  be  to  get  the  good  Dr.  Primrose  and  his  family 
into  as  much  misery  as  possible  and  then  out  again.  But  it 
afforded  Goldsmith  the  means  for  displaying  his  very  best  quaU- 
ties — his  humor,  his  tenderness,  and  his  power  to  portray  sym- 
pathetically such  scenes  and  characters  as  he  had  known  in  early 
life.  It  is,  as  Goethe  called  it,  a  prose-idyll.  The  style  is  the 
same  that  had  already  been  employed  so  effectively  in  the  essays 
— the  modern  English  made  smooth  by  Dryden,  Swift,  Addison, 
andJohnson,  butin  this  case  lowered  to  the  colloquial  key,  light- 
ened with  Irish  humor,  stripped  of  needless  dignity  and  pedantry, 
easy,  flexible,  lucid.  This  style  is  of  itself  one  of  the  main  secrets 
of  Goldsmith's  perennial  charm. 

"I  was  pleased  with  the  poor  man's  friendship  for  two  reasons: 
because  I  knew  that  he  wanted  mine,  and  I  knew  him  to  be  friendly 
as  far  as  he  was  able.  He  was  known  in  our  neighborhood  by  the 
character  of  the  poor  gentleman,  that  would  do  no  good  when  he 
was  young,  though  he  was  not  yet  thirty.  He  would  at  intervals 
talk  with  great  good  sense ;  but,  in  general,  he  was  fondest  of  the 
company  of  children,  whom  he  used  to  call  harmless  httle  men. 
He  was  famous,  I  found,  for  singing  them  ballads,  and  telling  them 
stories;  and  seldom  went  out  without  something  in  his  pockets  for 
them — a  piece  of  gingerbread,  or  an  half-penny  whistle.  He  gener- 
ally came  for  a  few  days  into  our  neighborhood  once  a  year,  and 
lived  upon  the  neighbors'  hospitality.  He  sat  down  to  supper 
among  us,  and  my  wife  was  not  sparing  of  her  gooseberry  wine. 
The  tale  went  round;  he  sung  us  old  songs,  and  gave  the  children 
the  story  of  the  Buck  of  Beverland,  with  the  history  of  Patient 
Griasel,  the  adv^entures  of  Catskin,  and  then  Fair  Rosamond's 
Bower.  Our  cock,  which  always  crew  at  eleven,  now  told  us  it 
was  time  for  repose;  but  an  unforeseen  difficulty  started  about 
lodging  the  stranger — all  our  beds  were  already  taken  up,  and  it 
was  too  late  to  send  him  to  the  next  alehouse.  In  this  dilemma, 
little  Dick  offered  him  his  part  of  the  bed,  if  his  brother  Moses 
would  let  him  lie  with  him.     '.\nd   I,'  cried   Bill,  '  will  give   Mr. 


212  MIDDLE   AND   LATE    EIGHTEENTH   CENTURY 

Burchell  my  part,  if  my  sisters  will  take  me  to  theirs.'  '  Well 
done,  my  good  children,'  cried  I;  'hospitality  is  one  of  the  first 
Christian  duties.  Tlic  beast  retires  to  its  shelter,  and  the  bird  flies 
to  its  nest;  but  helpless  man  can  only  find  refuge  from  his  fellow 
creature.  The  greatest  stranger  in  this  world  was  He  that  came 
to  save  it.  Me  never  had  a  house,  as  if  willing  to  see  what  hos- 
pitality was  left  remaining  among  us.  Deborah,  my  dear,'  cried  I 
to  my  wife,  '  give  those  boys  a  lump  of  sugar  each;  and  let  Dick's 
be  the  largest,  because  he  spoke  first.'" — (Chapter  VI.) 

On  yet  another  tablet  of  fame  was  "poor  Noll"  to  carve  his 
name  in  very  plain  letters.  In  1768  his  first  play,  The  Good- 
Natured  Man  was  i)roduced  at  Covent  Garden,  and  five  years 
later,  just  the  year  before  his  death,  his  second,  She  Stoops  to 
Conquer.  Better  known  than  even  the  Vicar  of  Wakefield,  She 
Stoops  to  Conquer  requires  no  extended  comment.  Purer  than 
almost  any  comedy  from  the  time  of  the  Restoration,  it  is  at 
the  same  time  more  abundantly  charged  with  sprightliness 
and  humor.  Tony  Lumpkin  is  the  incarnation  of  all  that 
was  simj)le,  delightful,  and  droll  in  the  author  himself;  and 
for  anything  more  fascinating  than  the  entire  play  we  should 
have  to  go  back,  not  to  Congreve  and  Wycherley,  but  to  Shake- 
speare himself — which  is  surely  sufficient  praise  for  the  man  of 
whom  none  would  have  dared  to  prophesy  that  he  would  ever 
wield  a  pen. 

Close  upon  the  heels  of  this  last  important  work  of  Gold- 
smith's followed  two  comedies  by  another  Irish  wi'iter  that  share 
Richard  ^'it'^  '*  the  distinction  of  being  to-day  the  most  familiar 
Brinnlcy  English  plays  outside  of  Shakespeare.  They  were, 
Sheridan,  first.  The  Rivals,  produced  at  Covent  Garden  in 
1/51-1816.  2775^  a.u{\,  second  and  much  more  important,  The 
School  for  Scandal,  played  at  Drury  Lane  in  1777.  Together  with 
several  other  plays  they  were  the  work  of  a  very  young  man, 
Richard  Brinsley  Sheridan,  who  succeeded  Garrick  as  proprietor 
of  Drury  Lane  Theatre  and  was  promptly  made  a  member  of  the 
Literary  Club,  though  politics  rather  than  literature  was  to  be 
his  future  career.     The  plays  are  comedies  of  manners,  not  of 


BURKE  213 

.sentiment,  idining  mostly  at  pure  fun,  partly  by  ludicrous  situa- 
tions and  still  more  by  witty  dialogue.  The  first-named  contains 
the  celebrated  characters  of  Sir  Anthony  Absolute  and  Mrs. 
Malaproj);  the  second,  Sir  Peter  and  La<ly  Teazle. 

Two  more  members  of  Johnson's  Club  were  to  crown 
the  achievements  of  this  century  in  prose  with  works  of  the 
highest  import.  We  have  scarcely  been  called  upon  to  take 
note  of  historical  writing  since  the  time  of  King  Alfred  and  of 
the  Saxon  Chronicle,  with  a  jjossible  exception  in  favor  of 
Clarendon's  History  of  the  Rebellion  in  the  seventeenth  cen- 
tury. Even  that  was  not  published  till  the  eighteenth;  and  it 
was  left  for  the  critical  eighteenth  century  to  take  up  this  kind 
of  A\Titing  in  earnest.  Goldsmith  himself  wrote  histories,  but 
Goldsmith  was  neither  learned  nor  critical.  Thomas  Warton 
wrote  a  history  of  English  poetry  after  a  plan  which  the  poet 
Gray  resigned  to  him.  Hume  and  Robertson,  both  Scotch- 
men, and  the  former  a  great  philosopher,  wrote  important 
histories  of  England  and  Scotland  respectively.  But  the  work 
which  eclipsed  them  all  is  that  which  Edward  Gib- 
Edward  ^^^  suddenly  conceived  at  Rome,  "amid  the  ruins 
'  of  the  Capitol,"  in  1764,  wrought  out  in  patience 
and  secrecy,  and  gave  to  the  world  between  1776  and 
1788.  By  the  vastness  of  its  plan,  its  philosophic  breadth,  its 
extreme  accuracy,  and  its  vigorous,  weighty,  and  often  gorgeous 
style,  The  Decline  and  Fall  of  the  Roman  Empire  ranks  at  once 
among  the  literary  monuments  of  the  eighteenth  century  and  the 
great  histories  of  the  world. 

The  other  member  of  Johnson's  Club  referred  to  above, 
.the  last  of  our  group,  and  perhaps  in  the  eyes  of  the  world  at 
large   the  greatest,    was   the   political   philosopher, 
Edmund       Edmund    Burke.     lAke    Goldsmith,    who    was    his 
'  senior  by  two  months  only,  Burke  was  born  in  Ire- 

land (in  Dublin),  and  like  him  came  to  London  a 
poor  adventurer.  He  began  by  publishing  several  essays, 
one  of  which,  the  once  famous  Ideas  of  the  Sublime  and  Beau- 


214  MIDDLE  AND   LATE     EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

tiful  (1756),  wjis  a  pioneer  in  tlie  field  of  .npsthetie  criticism 
Doubtless  it  was  his  philosophical  acumen  and  literary  talent 
that  drew  upon  him  Doctor  Johnson's  attention,  but  his  own 
immediate  ambitions  turned  him  toward  politics.  He  be- 
came in  time  secretary  to  Ix)rd  Rockingham  and  a  member  of 
Parliament,  where  his  speeches  soon  made  him  widely  famous, 
though  for  some  reason  not  easy  to  explain  they  more  often  scat- 
tered than  held  their  audiences.  His  grasp  of  public  affairs,  re- 
markable from  the  first,  grew  with  experience,  and  his  Thoughts 
an  the  Present  Discontents,  issued  in  1770,  was  recognized  as  the 
greatest  political  pamphlet  since  Swift's  On  the  Conduct  of  the 
Allies.  The  struggle  with  the  American  colonies  called  forth 
the  well  known  speeches  On  American  Taxation  (1774)  and  On 
Conciliation  with  America  (1775),  and  the  Letter  to  the  Sheriffs 
of  Bristol  (1777),  in  all  of  which  he  stoutly  opposed  the  war  policy 
of  the  Tory  administration  and  brought  his  arguments  and 
splendid  rhetoric  to  the  support  of  the  fundamental  principles 
for  which  the  colonies  were  contending.  Later,  during  the 
agitation  of  Indian  affairs,  roused  by  what  he  regarded  as  an 
abuse  of  the  privileges  of  office  and  of  power,  he  led  in  the 
memorable  impeachment  of  Warren  Hastings. 

Up  to  this  point  Burke's  course  was  clear,  if  not  always 
smooth,  and  under  happier  circumstances  he  might  well  have 
retired  and  closed  his  days  in  peace.  The  second  Pitt,  who  had 
succeeded  to  the  Ministry  in  1783,  was,  like  Walpole,  a  peace 
minister,  and  his  sympathy  with  the  humanizing  tendency  of 
the  time — with  everything  that  helped  to  cement  the  brother- 
hood of  men — promised  much  for  the  spread  of  the  democratic 
spirit.  Unfortunately  for  England,  this  same  spirit  on  the 
continent,  goaded  to  desperation,  precipitated  the  horrors  of  the 
French  Revolution.  Thereupon  Burke,  though  by  that  time  sixty 
years  of  age,  was  moved  to  further  efforts,  and  the  result  was  the 
maturest  flower  of  his  genius — the  series  of  works  extending 
from  ihe  Reflections  on  the  Revolution  in  France  in  1790  to  the 
Letters  on  a  Regicide  Peace  in  1796  (the  year  also  of  his  Letter 


BURKE  215 

to  a  Nobk  Lord).  In  these  works  he  seemed  to  many  to  have 
strangely  shifted  from  his  earher  democratic  attitude,  for  he 
declared  his  horror  of  the  French  Revolution  and  opposed  it 
to  his  last  breath.  But  the  inconsistency  is  only  seeming:  he  was 
all  the  time  at  heart  a  conservative  of  his  century.  He  had  the 
profoundest  reverence  for  institutions.  Society  and  government 
as  they  were  constituted  were,  in  his  eyes,  too  delicately  organized, 
too  solemnly  consecrated  by  time,  to  be  recklessly  overthrown. 
His  democracy  was  a  belief  in  the  proper  privileges  of  every  class, 
and  he  saw  in  the  Revolution  an  overturning  of  certain  privileges 
which  was  no  less  violent  and  unjust  than  the  abuses  which  had 
fomented  it.  His  course  was  after  all  in  accord  vdth  his  theories, 
and  his  passionate  sincerity  won  him  admiration  even  in  the 
lonely  hours  of  his  opposition  before  the  course  of  events  brought, 
for  a  time  at  least,  a  promise  of  ultimate  vindication.  He  died 
in  1797,  with  England  and  France  in  the  midst  of  their  desolating 
and  long-to-be-continued  war. 

Burke's  greatness  lay  in  the  political  acumen  of  which  we 
have  spoken — the  philosophical  insight  that  enabled  him  to  refer 
all  action  to,  and  test  it  by,  the  fundamental  principles  of  right 
and  WTong.  His  literary  strength  lay  first  in  his  talent  for  putting 
these  principles  and  applications  into  telling  and  easily  remem- 
bered aphoristic  form,  and  second  in  the  splendor  of  his  rhetoric, 
a  rhetoric  that  is  sometimes  almost  too  florid,  but  always  vehement 
and  impressive.  Few  speakers  or  writers  have  illuminated  their 
thoughts  more  freely  from  the  stored  wisdom  of  the  past,  or 
brought  to  them  such  support  from  the  fertility  of  their  own 
imagination.  So  poetic,  indeed,  was  Burke's  temperament 
that  he  was  no  less  a  prophet  of  the  dawning  era  of  imagination 
than  he  was  the  last  greet  spokesman  of  that  prosaic  "age  of 
reason"  which  had  virtually  died  before  his  death.  Across 
more  than  a  century  his  denunciation  of  any  attempt  to  justify 
the  atrocities  of  the  Revolution  rings  yet  with  imdiminished 
vigor: — 


216  MIDDLE    AND   LATE    EIGHTEENTH   CENTURY 

"  We  are  alarmed  into  reflection ;  our  minds  (as  it  has  long  .since 
been  observed)  are  purified  by  terror  and  pity;  our  weak,  unthinking 
pride  is  humbled  under  the  dispensations  of  a  mysterious  wisdom. 
Some  tears  might  be  drawn  from  mo  if  such  a  spectacle  were  exhibited 
on  the  stage.  I  should  be  truly  ashamed  of  finding  in  myself  that 
superficial,  theatric  sense  of  painted  distress,  whilst  I  could  exult  over 
it  in  real  life.  .  .  .  No  theatric  audience  in  Athens  would  bear 
what  has  been  borne,  in  the  midst  of  the  real  tragedy  of  this  triumphal 
day :  a  principal  actfjr  weighing,  as  it  were  in  scales  hung  in  a  shop  of 
horrors,  so  mucli  actual  crime  against  so  much  contingent  advantage, 
— and  after  putting  in  and  out  weights,  declaring  that  the  balance  was 
on  the  side  of  the  advantages.  They  would  not  bear  to  see  the  crimes 
of  new  democracy  posted  as  in  a  ledger  against  the  crimes  of  old  des- 
potism, and  the  bookkeepers  of  politics  finding  democracy  still  in  debt, 
but  by  no  moans  unable  or  unwilling  to  pay  the  balance.  .  .  Justi- 
fying perfidy  and  murder  for  public  benefit,  public  benefit  would  soon 
become  the  pretext,  and  perfidy  and  murder  the  end — until  rapacity, 
mahce,  revenge,  and  fear  more  dreadful  than  revenge,  could  satiate 
their  insatiable  appetites.  Such  must  be  the  consequences  of  losing, 
in  the  splendor  of  these  triumphs  of  the  rights  of  men,  all  natural  sense 
of  wrong  and  right." 

The  other  prose  writers  of  this  period,  considered  purely  as 
writers, — the  naturahst,  Gilbert  White  of  Selborne,  the  biogra- 
pher, James  Boswell,  the  moral  and  political  philosophers,  Wil- 
liam Paley,  Adam  Smith,  W^illiam  Godwin,  even  the  excellent 
letter  WTiters,  "Junius,"  Lord  Chesterfield,  Horace  Walpole, — 
pale  to  indistinction  beside  the  brilliance  of  Burke.  Boswell, 
indeed,  made  a  great  book,  but  it  has  already  and  most  properly 
been  described  in  connection  with  Johnson,  by  whose  faithfully 
reflected  greatness  it  shines;  it  is  doubtful  whether  Boswell  could 
have  written  a  good  biography  of  a  silent  great  man.  With 
Burke,  therefore,  we  may  best  conclude  our  survey  of  the  cen- 
tury's prose;  and  it  may  be  interesting  to  compare  with  the 
passage  last  quoted  the  brief  citations  that  were  made  from  Swift 
and  Addison  in  the  early  years,  and  from  Johnson  in  the  middle, 
to  see  how  this  improved  instrument  which  Dryden  and  his  fel- 
lows l)equeathed  to  the  century  has  fared  in  its  hands.  For 
this  j)urj)osc  a  few  sentences  are  absurdly  inade(jualc,  the  more 


THE    ROMANTIC   REVIVAL  217 

SO  as  each  fragment  takes  its  character  from  the  idiosyncrasy  of 
its  author  quite  as  much  as  from  the  general  tendency  of  its  time. 
Yet  it  is  possible  to  detect  even  in  these  brief  examples, 
the  certain  evidence  of  change.  Without  losing  any  of  its 
acquired  regularity  and  precision,  prose  has  clearly  added  a 
new  strength  and  splendor.  What  in  Swift  was  pedestrian,  in 
Burke  takes  wings;  and  we  are  reminded  of  the  days  before  its 
discipline  and  severe  subjection  to  law,  when,  under  the  spell 
of  men  like  Taylor,  Browne,  and  Milton,  prose  with  all  its  im- 
perfections was  an  instrument  of  almost  poetic  range  and  power. 
Macaulay  has  commented  upon  the  fact  that  Burke's  early  prose, 
though  upon  an  aesthetic  theme,  is  curiously  unadorned,  whereas 
the  political  essays  of  his  last  years  are  almost  unbecomingly 
gorgeous.  The  change  was  tvpical;  it  brings  us  indeed  to  the 
verge  of  a  great  movement  that  makes  the  close  of  this  century 
another  landmark  in  literary  history;  and  as  we  turn  from  the 
prose  of  the  century  to  complete  the  record  of  its  poetry,  we  may 
scan  somewhat  more  narrowly  the  nature  of  the  reaction  that 
was  working  the  change. 

It  shoidd  be  said  at  once  that  we  have  here  to  deal  with  what 

is  commonly  known  as  the  Romantic  Revival.     This  revival 

means,  briefly,  that  men  were  beginning  to  weary 

•'  ^  of  their  narrow  range  of  domestic  and  political  inter- 

„  .  ,  ests,  and  of  the  repression  and  stiff  formalitv  to 
Revival .  /  ^  . 

which  they  had  so  long  subjected  themselves.  They 
demanded  to  feel  as  well  as  think,  to  enjoy  without  criticising, 
and  to  give  freer  scope  to  imagination.  They  were  returning 
with  relief  to  the  primary  sources  of  emotion — to  out-of-door 
nature  and  the  simpler  relations  of  life;  and  they  were  opening 
anew  old  sources  of  wonder — the  enchantment  of  foreign  lands, 
of  ancient  fable  and  media'val  legend,  and  all  the  shadowy 
mysteries  of  the  unseen  and  the  unknown.  This  may  seem 
a  vague  descrij)tion  of  roman(icis"m,  but  vagueness  is  of  its 
essence;  it  refuses  to  be  circumscribed  by  a  definition,  or  com- 
prehended in  a  list  of  particular  features.     It  is  the  spirit  of 


218  MIDDLE   AND   LATE    EIGHTEENTH   CENTURY 

escape  from  the  matter-of-fact  into  the  realm  of  passion,  imagi- 
nation, and  aspiration,  and  the  forms  of  beauty  in  which  it 
shapes  its  ideals  are  the  precise  opposites  of  classic  purity, 
restraint,  and  repose.  Naturally  such  a  spirit  finds  in  poetry 
its  fullest  manifestation. 

Much  of  the  initial  influence  of  this  romantic  revival  is  to 
be  ascribed  to  James  Thomson,  a  poet  of  the  earlier  half  of  the 
century.  Thomson  was  a  Scotchman  who  was 
James  brought  up  on  the  Border,  educated  at  Edinburgh, 

omson,  ^^j  drawn  south  to  pursue  his  worldly  and  other 
fortunes.  As  early  as  1726  he  began  the  publi- 
cation of  The  Seasons  with  his  poem  on  "Winter,"  to  be  fol- 
lowed with  "Summer"  and  "Spring"  in  the  succeeding  years, 
and  concluded  with  "Autumn"  in  1730.  It  was  immediately 
popular  (notwithstanding  its  difference  from  the  manner  of  Pope, 
who  praised  it  himself) ,  and  Thomson  was  looked  upon  as  a  rising 
poet.  But  the  indifferent  plays  and  other  things  which  he  wrote 
failed  to  add  to  his  reputation,  until,  in  the  very  last  year  of  his 
life,  he  published  the  admirable  allegory  of  The  Castle  of  Indo- 
lence (1748).     His  death  followed  Pope's  by  only  four  years. 

In  one  respect  Thomson's  verse  followed  the  current  fashion. 
It  is  full  of  frigid  personification,  conventional  epithets,  and 
pedantic  paraphrases.  Pestilence  "stalks,"  Discord  utters  "jan- 
gling words,"  Wisdom  "dejects  his  watchful  eye;"  evening  is 
"humid,"  winter  "gelid;"  cows  are  the  "milky  drove;"  eggs  are 
"©various  food."  But  while  these  things  doubtless  helped  to 
make  Thomson  acceptable  to  his  time,  it  is  other  things  that, 
from  our  point  of  view,  give  him  his  real  distinction.  In  the  first 
place  he  revolted  from  the  domination  of  the  heroic  couplet. 
The  Seasons  is  in  blank  verse,  not  infrequently  Miltonic  in  ca- 
dence; and  in  the  Castle  of  Indolence  he  revived,  as  Shenstone 
did  in  The  Schoolmistress,  the  Spenserian  stanza,  which  had  been 
neglected  for  a  hundred  years.  In  the  second  place  he  revolted 
from  the  all  but  universal  town  poetry  and  sought  his  inspira- 


COLLINS  219 

tion  in  the  fields  and  woods.  His  "Winter"  is  filled  with  obser- 
vations evidently  made  in  his  boyhood  in  the  north  country: — 

"Thefoodless  WUds 
Pour  forth  their  brown  inhabitants.     The  Hare, 
Though  timorous  of  heart,  and  hard  beset 
By  death  in  various  forms,  dark  snares  and  dogs, 
And  more  unpitying  men,  the  garden  seeks, 
Urged  on  by  fearless  want.     The  bleating  kine 
Eye  the  bleak  Heaven,  and  next  the  glistening  earth, 
♦  With  looks  of  dumb  despair;  then,  sad  dispersed. 
Dig  for  the  withered  herb  through  heaps  of  snow." 

When  these  imaginative  pictures  of  external  nature  are  com- 
bined, as  in  the  Castle  of  Indolence,  with  some  of  the  most  mellif- 
luous verse  between  Spenser  and  Shelley,  the  difference  between 
Thomson  and  Pope  or  Johnson  may  be  sharply  felt. 

Another  exponent  of  mingled  classic  and  romantic  tenden- 
cies was  the  ill-starred  Collins,  upon  whose  slender  volume  of  a 
dozen  Odes,  pubHshed  in  1747,  rests  a  slender  but 

^  „.  secure  fame.     The  "Pindaric"  ode  to  The  Passions, 

Collins,  .     .  ,  .  ,  .  ,, 

1721-1759.    beginning  "When  Music,  heav  nly  maid,  was  young, 

has  long  been  a  favorite  for  recitation.     Of  higher 

purely  poetic  merit  are  the  delicate,  unrhymed  Horatian  Ode  to 

Evening  and  the  two  exquisite  Httle  stanzas  of  Ho^v  Sleep  the 

Brave: — 

"  How  sleep  the  brave  who  sink  to  rest 
By  all  their  country's  wishes  blest! 
When  Spring,  with  dewy  fingers  cold. 
Returns  to  deck  their  hallow'd  mold, 
She  there  shall  dress  a  sweeter  sod 
Than  Fancy's  feet  have  ever  trod. 

"By  fairy  hands  their  knell  is  rung; 
By  forms  unseen  their  dirge  is  sung; 
There  Honour  comes,  a  pilgrim  gray. 
To  bless  the  turf  that  wraps  their  clay; 
And  Freedom  shall  awhUe  repair 
To  dwell,  a  weeping  hermit,  there." 


220  MIDDLE    AND    I.ATK    KICHTEEXTH    CENTUIIY  ' 

Collins's  roniauticism  reveals  itself  more  particularly  in  his  feel- 
ing fi)r  the  supernatural.  Oi  nature  he  cannot  be  called  a  close 
observer;  he  feels  more  than  he  sees.  Yet  his  characterization 
is  sure,  as  at  least  one  j^hrasc  in  the  lines  just  quoted  shows;  and 
the  instinctive  manner  in  which,  in  his  impressionistic  ode,  he 
has  depicted  the  various  sights  and  sounds  of  evening,  from  the 
bat  that  "  flits  by  on  leathern  wing"  to  the  "  upland  fallows  grey" 
that  reflect  the  lake's  "last  cool  gleam,"  compels  us  to  revert  to 
Milton  himself  to  find  an  equally  inspired  poet  of  the  twilight 
hour. 

Much  better  known  than  either  Thomson  or  Collins  is  a 

third  poet  of  this  unobtrusive  school.    Thomas  Gray,  the  author 

of  the  Elegy  Written  in  a  Country  Churchyard,  *  was 

^,  born  in  London  but  spent  most  of  his  life  as  a  re- 

(jray,  ,  ^ 

1716-1771.  t-'luse  at  Cambridge.  He  was  a  scholar  of  really 
prodigious  acquirements,  especially  well  versed  in 
European  history  and  languages.  His  letters,  it  should  be  said, 
though  never  intended  for  publication,  are  among  the  very 
best  of  an  age  of  letter-writing,  excelling  even  the  more  familiar 
epistles  of  his  friend,  Horace  Walpole.  They  show  Gray  to 
have  been  a  lover  of  the  wildly  rugged  and  picturesque  in  nature, 
a  thing  quite  unusual  in  his  day.  His  poetic  product,  meagre  in 
amount,  painfully  elaborated,  and  hesitatingly  published,  re- 
duces itself  for  the  average  student  to  four  short  poems, 
and  for  the  wider  public  to  one.  The  Ode  on  a  Distant  Prospect 
of  Eton  College  was  written  in  1742  and  published  anonymously 
in  1747;  the  Elegy,  probably  begun  also  at  the  earlier  date,  was 
published  in  the  same  way  in  1751.  Two  years  later  these  were 
published  under  the  author's  name,  with  four  other  poems,  in- 
cluding the  delightful  Ode  on  the  Death  of  a  Favourite  Cat  (Mr. 
Walpole' s — "Drowned  in  a  tub  of  gold  fishes").     Four  years 

*The  original  title  runs,  "An  Elegy  Wrote  in  a  Country  Church  Yard." 
This  substitution  of  the  preterite  form  for  the  perfect  participle  in  the  strong 
verbs  gained  such  wide  currency  among  scholars  and  writers  of  the  eighteenth 
century  that  it  seems  strange  the  regular  form  should  have  recovered  its 
position. 


GRAY 


221 


later  still,  in  1757,  appeared  the  Pindaric  odes — The  Progress 
of  Poesy  ("Awake,  iEolian  lyre,  awake")  and  The  Bard  ("Ruin 
seize  thee,  ruthless  King"), 

It  is  easy  to  point  out  the  conventional  notes  in  these  poems 
— their  personifications,  apostrophes,  and  the  like.  They  are 
markedly  elegant;  their  absolutely  classical  finish  is  one  of  their 
highest  merits;  the  Pindarics  are  of  the  correct  type,  not  the  mis- 
takenly lawless  type  of  Cowley;  the  quatrains  are  as  chaste,  if 


THE  CHURCHYA«r>  OF  GRAY'S  ET^KGY 

it  Sfak-i'  Piif/fs 

not  quite  so  cold,  as  if  tliey  were  chiselled  in  marble.  A^et  Gray 
wears  his  elegance  with  a  difference.  That  he  should  have  used 
lyric  quatrains,  or  odes  with  their  intricate  harmonies,  at  all,  is 
the  first  note  of  this  difference.  That  he  should  have  followed 
his  imagination  into  "dark  unfathom'd  caves  of  ocean"  or  into 
"climes  beyond  the  solar  road,"  is  another.  That  he  should 
have  suffused  his  verse  with  a  Penserosan  melancholy,  that  he 
should  have  haunted  in  fancy  "the  cool  sequestered  vale  of  life," 
in  genuine  sympathy  with  village  Hampdens  and  inglorious  Mil- 
tons,  with  rustic  morals  and  pious  tears,  are  yet  others.     INIore- 


222  MIDDLE   AND    LATE    EIGnTEENTH    CENTURY 

over,  it  is  easy  to  forget  that  the  seeming  conventionality  of  liis 
verses  is  due  in  part  to  our  familiarity  with  them — a  convention- 
ality of  his  own  creating.  The  Elegy  is  not  the  most  original  of 
poems,  but  neither  is  it  the  least  original.  In  its  time  and  place  it 
is  not  unlike  a  well-spring  in  a  desert,  with  its  counterparts  so  few 
or  so  far  across  the  parched  sands  that  they  cannot  cheapen  its 
pricelessness.  It  has  the  rare  distinction,  paralleled  only  by 
Wordsworth's  great  Ode,  of  having  almost  usurped  its  class- 
name,  so  that  other  English  elegies,  even  greater  ones,  must  be 
henceforth  called  rather  "elegiac  poems."  The  elegy  is  Gray's; 
and  with  its  purity,  its  simplicity,  its  melody,  its  noble  senti- 
ment and  tender  humanity,  it  is  the  rightful  and  immortal 
classic  of  the  middle  eighteenth  century. 

As  Gray  entered  upon  the  last  decade  of  his  life,  his  lin- 
guistic studies  were  extended  to  Celtic  and  Norse,  including 
Icelandic.  Incidentally  he  produced  several  poetic  para- 
phrases from  the  literatures  in  those  tongues — from  the  Welsh, 
for  instance,  Tlw  Triumphs  of  Owen,  and  from  the  Norse,  The 
Fatal  Sisters  and  The  Descent  of  Odin.  The  opening  lines  of 
the  last-named  may  be  cited: — 

"Uprose  the  King  of  Men  with  speed, 
And  saddled  straight  his  coal-black  steed; 
Down  the  yawning  steep  he  rode, 
That  leads  to  Hola's  drear  abode." 

These  paraphrases  are  not  always  taken  into  consideration 
in  the  estimate  of  Gray's  poetic  product.  But  it  is  of  signifi- 
cance that  the  poet  who,  before  the  middle  of  the  century, 
wrote  a  fairly  conventional  ode  upon  his  college  in  which 
schoolboys  "chase  the  rolling  circle's  speed,"  should  by  1701 
be  engaged  upon  work  like  this,  work  which  points  unmistak- 
ably to  a  shift  of  poetic  interest.  In  fact,  the  seventh 
decade  of  the  century  was  one  of  somewhat  marked  romantic 
impulse,  and  it  is  possible  to  point  to  at  least  thre<i  contem])ora- 
neous  events  significant  of  the  change. 


CHATTERTON  223 

The  first  was  the  appearance,  in   1762,  of  James  Mac- 
pherson's  Fingal,  a  kind  of  epic  which  was  alleged  to  be  a  trans- 
lation of  the  work  of  an  ancient  Gaelic  poet  by  the 

,  ^    .     ,,   name  of  Ossian.     So  much  of  it  as  may  be  traced 
of  Ossian.  ,         .  ,  , 

back  to  Gaelic  originals  has  certainly  been  freely 

remodelled;  much  is  doubtless  Macpherson's  own  composition. 

It  is  all  in  rhythmical,  often  metrical,  prose,  and  generally  vague 

and  turgid. 

"  Many  a  voice  and  many  a  harp,  in  tuneful  sounds  arose.  Of 
Fingal's  noble  deeds  they  sung;  of  Fingal's  noble  race.  And  some- 
times, on  the  lonely  sound,  was  heard  the  name  of  Ossian.  . . 

"The  king  stood  by  the  stone  of  Lubar.  Thrice  he  reared  his 
terrible  voice.  The  deer  started  from  the  fountains  of  Cromla.  The 
rocks  shook  on  all  their  hills.  Like  the  noise  of  a  hundred  mountain- 
streams,  that  burst,  and  roar,  and  foam!  like  the  clouds  that  gather 
to  a  tempest  on  the  blue  face  of  the  sky!  so  met  the  sons  of  the 
desert,  round  the  terrible  voice  of  Fingal." 

The  importance  of  this  lies,  not  in  its  intrinsic  value,  but  in  the 

zest  with  which  it  was  received — in  its  evidence  of  a  craving  for 

imaginative  stimulus  which  could  find  satisfaction 

Percy  s         even  in  mock  sublimity.     Much  more  important, 
"Reliaues "  .       .  .  . 

^     ^     '    epoch-making  indeed,  were  the  Reliques  of  Ancient 

English  Poetry — the  old  folk  ballads,  which  have 
been  described  in  an  earlier  chapter,  but  which  only  at  the  date 
at  which  we  have  now  arrived  were  gathered  into  an  accessible 
book  form,  by  Thomas  Percy.*  The  influence  of  these  upon  the 
progress  of  English  poetry  ever  since  has  been  quite  incalculable, 

for  the  ballad  became  in  the  next  century  as  con- 

Thomas         spicuous  a  type  as  the  ode  was  in  this.     In  the  third 
Chatterton,       i  •     .u-  i       j  ^i 

'    place,  m  this  same  decade  rose  the  precocious  genius 

of   the    much     lamented     Thomas     Chatterton — a 

youth  who,  struggling  less  successfully  than  others  against  the 

starvation  that  assailed  jjoor  author-recruits  in  London,  took 

*  Some  of  the  baUads  had  been  printed  before,  both  separately  and  in  col- 
Jections.  But  Percy's  coUeotlou,  which  was  based  chiefly  on  a  Folio  MS.  in 
early  seventeenth  century  handwriting,  practically  superseded  all  others. 


224  MIDDLE   AND   LATE    KIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

poison  jukI  died  before  he  was  eighteen  years  old.  Chatterton 
was  imitating  antique  poetry  as  early  as  17G4,  when  at  his  Bristol 
home  he  lay  on  the  hillside  dreaming  upon  the  "cunning  handi- 
work so  fine"  of  the  old  church  of  St.  Mary  RedcUffe;  and  in 
1765  he  began  to  write  the  poems  which  he  pretended  were  the 
composition  of  an  eaily  poet  and  which  are  often  known  as  the 
"Rowley  forgeries."  The  first  collected  edition  was  in  1777. 
The  jioems  are  the  work  of  a  boy,  but  of  a  very  gifted  boy, 
and  several,  such  as  The  Balade  of  Charitie,  and  the  Shake- 
spearean dirge  in  /Ella,  cannot  be  refused  high  praise. 

Naturally  the  great  Dictator  of  the  age,  the  representative 
of  its  conservatism,  set  his  face  steadily  against  this  movement. 

(xoldsmith,  too,  notwithstanding  his  romantic  in- 
W  illiam  stincts,  wrote  couplets  like  Pope  and  moralized 
jjoI_jof)Q     like  Johnson.     But  others  were  quietly  following  the 

new  lead,  and  some  twelve  years  after  the  death  of 
Gray  and  Chatterton,  just  as  Johnson's  long  career  came  to 
its  close,  there  appeared  a  group  of  four  widely  scattered  poets 
in  whom  the  changing  spirit  became  increasingly  manifest.  The 
eldest  of  these  was  William  Cowper.  Cowper's  life,  with  its 
clouds  and  disappointments,  his  extreme  sensitiveness,  his 
recurrent  attacks  of  insanity  in  which  he  believed  that  his 
soul  was  lost  and  more  than  once  attempted  suicide,  his  retire- 
ment under  the  care  of  friends  at  Olney  upon  the  Ouse,  where 
he  solaced  himself  with  gardening,  walking,  drawing,  and 
making  squirrel-cages  and  rabbit-hutches  for  his  numerous  pets, 
have  all  been  subjects  of  much  interest,  the  more  especially  as 
they  have  been  detailed  by  himself  in  some  of  the  most  admirable 
letters  ever  penned.  But  we  are  here  concerned  chiefly  with 
his  poetry,  most  of  which  was  written  after  he  was  fifty  years  of 
age,  as  a  diversion  merely,  and  at  the  solicitation  of  friends. 
Somewhat  earlier  were  a  few  religious  hymns — "There  is  a 
fountain  filled  with  blood,"  "God  moves  in  a  mysterious  way," 
etc.  His  first  volume  of  collected  Poems  was  published  in  1782 
and  was  made  up  principally  of  didactic  pieces  in  the  established 


cowPER  225 

couplet  measure.  The  humorous  and  ever  popular  ballad  of 
John  Gilpin  appeared  in  1783.  Then,  in  1785,  he  published 
his  chief  poem,  The  Task,  in  six  books,  the  product  of  a  year's 
labor,  undertaken  at  the  suggestion  of  Lady  Austen  that  he  try 
a  long  poem  in  l^Iank  verse.  His  translation  of  Homer  (1791), 
in  the  same  verse,  is  of  minor  importance.  One  short  poem. 
The  Castaway,  written  in  the  last  year  of  his  life,  is  impressive 
for  its  gloom  and  the  imaginative  portrayal  of  his  own  condition. 
In  The  Task,  perhaps,  and  in  several  pieces  in  a  similar  vein 
— Yardleij  Oak  and  the  elegiac  Lines  on  My  Mother's  Picture — are 
to  be  found  most  pervadingly  the  qualities  Avhich  give  the  recluse 
of  Olney  his  modest  but  assured  distinction.  Their  didacticism 
is  for  the  most  part  neither  satiric  nor  melancholy,  as  might  have 
been  expected,  but  kindly,  cheerful,  and  even  humorous.  There- 
fore the  "task"  in  composition  which  his  friend  set  him  seems 
oddly  and  unfortunately  named.  For  the  reader  is  enticed 
through  its  rambling  reflections  by  much  the  same  charms  as 
lure  one  through  a  copse  or  wood — a  mass  of  greener  foliage,  a 
patch  of  sun,  a  snatch  of  music,  a  bank  upon  which  to  rest  and 
meditate. 

"Lovely  indeed  the  mimic  works  of  Art, 
But  Nature's  works  far  lovelier.     .     . 
The  air  salubrious  of  her  lofty  hills, 
The  cheering  fragrance  of  her  dewy  vales, 
And  music  of  her  woods — no  works  of  man 
May  rival  these ;  these  all  bespeak  a  power 
Peculiar,  and  exclusively  her  own. 
Beneath  the  open  sky  she  spreads  the  feast ; 
'Tis  free  to  all — 'tis  every  day  renewed; 
Who  scorns  it,  starves  deservedly  at  home." 

Cowper  gladly  turns  his  back  upon  the  feverish  and  futile  strife 
of  society,  upon  the  toil 

"Of  dropping  buckets  into  empty  wells 
And  growing  old  in  drawing  nothing  up," 

to  watch  the  sheep  stream  out  of  the  fold  and  over  the  glebe,  or 
the  loaded  wain  creep  in  from  the  ha}^eld,  or  to  listen  to  the 


226  MIDDLE   AND   LATE    EIGHTEENTH   CENTURY 

stockdoves  cooing  in  the  pines.  "God  made  tlie  countrv,"  he 
declares,  in  his  religious  enthusiasm  for  the  natural  life,  "and 
man  made  the  town,"  It  is  true,  he  views  these  scenes  always 
from  the  standpoint  of  a  meditative  poet,  not  of  an  actor  in  them, 
but  he  does  what  the  eighteenth  century  writer  too  seldom  did — 
he  composes,  in  Wordsworth's  phrase,  "with  his  eye  upon  the 
object;"  his  sympathies  are  indisputably  genuine — his  raptures 
are  never,  to  use  his  own  words,  "conjured  up."  It  is  this  spirit 
which,  in  spite  of  all  his  formalism,  betrays  his  kinship  with  the 
romanticists. 

It  is  sometimes  said  that  Cowper's  poetry  was  eminently 
poetry  for  the  middle  classes.     The  same  statement  might  be 

made  of  the  more  voluminous  verse  of  George 
jeorge  Crabbe.     He   was    born    considerably    later   than 

175A-18S2     Cowper,  but  he  began  to  write  at  the  same  time  and 

in  a  not  very  different  manner,  except  that  he  held 
steadfastly  fo  the  couplet,  even  well  into  the  next  century.  Born 
in  a  borough  of  Suffolk  on  the  east  coast  and  reared  in  poverty, 
he  determined  to  write,  with  entire  fidelity,  and  for  such  good  as 
it  might  do,  the  poetry  of  the  life  he  knew. 

"  By  such  examples  taught,  I  paint  the  cot, 
As  Truth  will  paint  it  and  as  bards  will  not.     .     .     . 
Can  poets  soothe  you,when  you  pine  for  bread, 
By  winding  myrtles  round  your  ruin'd  shed?" 

Tales  of  the  miseries  of  peasant  life,  in  village  or  workhouse,  in 
the  field  or  on  the  sea,  enlivened  by  character  sketches  or  relieved 
by  a  background  of  natural  scenery,  constitute  the  staple  of  his 
verse.  His  first  important  poem.  The  Village,  published  in  1783 
and  actually  revised  by  Johnson,  was  followed  after  many  years 
by  what  seemed  strangely  belated  successors.  The  Borough 
(1810)  and  Tales  of  the  Hall  (1819).  They  have  not  the  gra- 
cious qualities  of  Cowper's  verse,  and  in  their  naked  and  homely 
realism  they  may  seem  most  unromantic.  But  they  are  intensely 
human,  and  they  at  least  threw  their  weight  against  whatever 
artificial  sentiment  may  have  still  existed. 


BURNS  227 

William  Blake,  a  London  painter  and  engraver,  was  a 
poet  of   a  very  different   tv-pe.      In    liini    there   was    nothing 

of  the  old,  but  the  new  notes  which  he  struck  were 
Blak  ^'~*  ^^^  ^^^^  mystical,  verging  indeed  upon  madness, 

1757-1837.    that    it    was    long   before    their    significance    was 

seen  or  their  value  properly  weighed.  His  only  regu- 
larly issued  volume  of  poems  was  the  youthful  Political  Sketches  of 
the  year  1783.  To  these  must  be  added  Smigs  of  Innocence 
(1789)  and  Songs  of  Experience  (1794),  which  he  engraved 
on  plates  along  with  pictorial  and  ornamental  designs, 
and  in  this  shape  struck  off  for  his  friends.  The  poems  are  char- 
acterized by  a  strange  but  simple  inmginativeness  not  unlike  that 
of  a  child.  "Thou  fair-haired  Angel  of  the  Evening"  is  the  way 
in  which  he  addresses  the  evening  star.  The  body  of  his  work 
is  too  slight,  and  the  character  of  it  too  unsubstantial  and  too 
incoherent,  to  base  upon  it  any  title  to  greatness;  but  now  that 
our  eyes  are  reopened  to  this  sort  of  beauty,  there  is  no  missing 
in  Blake  an  occasional  freshness  that  takes  us  back  to  the  Eliza- 
bethan singers,  or  an  occasional  "elfin"  charm  that  carries  us 
forward  to  Coleridge  and  Keats. 

"I  laid  me  down  upon  a  bank, 
Where  love  lay  sleeping: 
I  heard  among  the  rushes  dank 
Weeping,  weeping." 

Of  these  three  poets,  only  Cowper,  who  attended  Westmin- 
ster School,  had  a  fair  formal  education.     Still  farther  removed 

from  academic  influences  and  closer  to  the  humble 
o  life  of  which  he  sang,  stood  Robert  Burns,  the  fourth 

1759-1796.    ^^  th^  group,  and  the  most  poetically  gifted  of  them 

all.  There  are  few  who  do  not  know  the  story  of 
the  Ayrshire  ploughman- — how,  with  a  mind  fitted  for  higher 
things  and  a  temperament  ardent  beyond  the  measure  of  his  will, 
he  struggled  with  his  hard  lot  of  poverty  and  temptation;  how 
he  pored  over  his  collections  of  EngHsh  songs  while  driving  his 
cart  or  walking  to  his  labor,   making  songs  of  his  own  when 


228 


MIDDLE    AND   LATE    EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 


his  hands  were  engaged  in  plowing;  how  he  loved  and  lost  his 
"Highland  Mary,"  and  loved  and  wronged  his  "bonnie  Jean" 
Armour;  how  at  twenty-seven  he  rose  to  fame  by  the  publication 
of  his  Kilinarnoc^k  volume  and  made  a  brief  triumphal  progress  to 
Edinburgh  and  through  Scotland;  and  how  he  returned  to  the 
farm  and  Jeanie  and  to  the  pitiful  occupation  of  inspecting 
liquors — "gauging  ale-barrels" — until  his  misfortunes  and  frail- 
ties made  final  Avrock  of  his  too  short  life.     It  is  under  just  such 

conditions  that  we  might  ex- 
pect the  note  of  freedom  and 
unconventionality  to  be  most 
boldly  struck;  and  while  it  is 
possible  to  exaggerate  Burns's 
independence  of  models^ — for 
he  knew  something  of  Shake- 
speare and  Po{)e  and  very 
much  of  Allan  Ramsay 
and  Robert  Fergusson — yet 
the  impetus  which  he  added 
to  the  gathering  strength  of 
romanticism  lay  precisely  in 
the  spontaneity  of  his  lyric 
message  and  its  sturdy  decla- 
ration of  the  worth  of  the 
individual. 
There  is  no  list  of  "works"  to  be  recorded  of  Burns.  His 
volume  of  Poems  chiefly  in  the  Scottish  Dialect  was  published  in 
1786  in  the  hope  that  it  might  bring  him  a  sufficient  return  to 
enable  him  to  emigrate  to  Jamaica.  Several  editions  of  it 
followed,  but  he  published  no  second  independent  collection, 
though  from  the  time  when,  at  fifteen  or  earlier,  he  "first  com- 
mitted the  sin  of  rhyme,"  he  composed  more  or  less  continu- 
ously all  his  life.  There  are  only  the  separate  poems  then 
to  take  account  of,  some  of  which,  like  The  Cotter's  Saturday 
Night,  Tarn  O'Shanier,  and  The  Jolly  Beggars,  attain  a  length 


THE  rLOUCJHMAN-l'OET 


BURNS  229 

of  several  pages,  but  most  of  which  are  extemporaneous  effu- 
sions, Hke  To  a  Mouse  and  To  a  Mountain  Daisy,  or  like  the  still 
more  simply  constructed  songs,  Auld  Lmig  Syne,  Bonnie  Doon, 
The  Ba7iks  of  Ayr,  Highland  Alary,  Ajton  Water,  and  scores  of 
others.  Perhaps  the  first  thing  to  be  noted  of  this  luxuriant 
and  seemingly  careless  product,  is  the  fact  that  it  is  mostly  in  the 
nature  of  folk-poetry^ — the  poetry  of  a  locality  and  a  clan. 
Bums's  verse  exercises  in  the  literary  English  of  his  southern 
kinsmen  are,  with  few  exceptions,  so  much  inferior  to  his  native 
dialect  poems,  that  they  add  nothing  to  his  fame.*  In  verse,  as 
in  fact,  he  never  got  -very  far  south  of  the  border.  With  all  his 
love  for  poetry  in  general  he  cared  most  for  the  songs  of  the  peo- 
ple, and  it  was  songs  of  the  people  that  he  mainly  wrote.  Nor 
is  it  quite  possible,  without  some  command  of  their  Lowland 
Scotch  dialect,  to  appreciate  the  full  beauty  of  either  poems  or 
songs.  Fortunately,  it  is  also  not  quite  possible  to  miss  all,  or 
even  the  major  part,  of  their  manifold  charm.  For  beneath 
their  simplicity,  and  what,  at  a  superficial  glance,  looks  like 
an  essential  similarity,  there  runs  a  varied  revelation  of  native 
endowments  any  one  of  which  would  have  given  the  poet  a 
modest  niche  in  the  temple  of  fame. 

The  pure  charm  of  nature,  close  as  Burns  stood  to  it,  is 
perhaps  one  of  the  less  conspicuous  of  his  poetic  elements.  But 
it  is  by  no  means  absent,  as  indeed  it  was  never  absent  from 
Scotch  poetry;  even  in  the  days  of  Pope's  artificial  pastorals 
Scotland  had  a  true  pastoral  poet  in  Allan  Ramsay,  and  it  will 
be  remembered  that  Thomson  came  from  the  Scottish  border. 
So  ever  and  again,  in  Burns's  poems,  the  summer  "  blinks  on 
flowery  braes,"  or  the  "frosty  winds  blaw  in  the  dnft"  while  the 
birds  cower  their  "chitterin  wings,"      Not  often  directly  cele- 


•  For  a  different  view,  see  an  article  on  "  Burns  as  an  English  Poet."  by 
David  C.  Murray,  in  the  (Joiiteiuporary  Review,  November,  1902.  Mr.  Murray 
both  upholds  the  merit  of  the  Knglish  poems  and  calls  attention  to  the  fact 
that  there  is  often  but  a  sprinkling  of  dialect  in  iheothei-s;  in  Scots  Wha  Hue, 
for  Instance,  there  are  but  Ave  dialect  forms.  "  You  have  but  to  write  o  for  a. 
to  insert  a  r  and  a  double  I,  and  behold !  a  poem  without  a  trace  of  local  color." 


230 


MIDDLE   AND   LATK    ErOHTEENTH   CENTURY 


brated,  Nature  is  yet  almost  omnipresciit  as  a  background^ — an 
inevitable  result  of  the  poet's  delight  in  her  changing  moods  and 
his  sympathy  with  all  her  children.  More  distinctly  in  the  fore- 
ground is  his  wide-embracing  sympathy  with  humankind.  Senti- 
ment, deepening  to  love,  now  devout  and  tender,  now  passionate 
and  uncontrolled,  is  of  the  very  essence  of  the  genius  of  him  who 
succumbed  in  literature  to  the  effusiveness  of  Sterne's  Sentimen- 
tal Journey  and  ^Mackenzie's  Man  of  Feeling,  and  in  life  to  the 
charms  of  half  the  women  he  met.  It  is  this  tenderness  for  hu- 
manity that  lies  at  the  base  of 
his  intensely  real  portraitures  of 
chara(,'ters  and  customs^ — such 
flashlight  pictures  as  Iloly  Fair 
and  Halloween  and  llie  Jolly 
Beggars.  It  is  the  same  thing 
that  in.spires  the  patriotism  of 
the  martial  Scots  Wha  Hae  wi' 
Wallace  Bled;  that  illuminates 
the  domestic  joy  and  peace  of 
The  Cotter's  Saturday  Night,  or 
breathes  through  the  fervid  re- 
ligious hymns  which  spring 
not  unnaturally  from  the  lips  of  a  consciously  sinful  creature; 
that  overflows  in  his  humor  and  gives  warrant  to  the  sharpest 
stings  of  his  satire;  and  that  bestows  an  everlasting  frank 
upon  his  sometimes  commonplace  but  always  glorified  moral- 
izing,-— upon  "A  man's  a  man  for  a'  that,"  or  "O  wad  some 
Power  the  giftie  gie  us,"  or 

"To  mak  a  happy  fireside  clime 
For  weans  an'  wife. 
That's  the  true  pathos  an'  sublime 
O'  human  life." 

These  are  things  that,  rightfully  enough,  give  Burns  an  ex- 
alted place  in  the  hearts  of  all  who,  con.sciously  or  otherwise, 
read  poetry  for  its  "criticism  of  life." 


TIIK  COTTKK'H  HATUKDAV 


BURNS  231 

It  remains  only  for  a  colder  critical  inquiry  to  fix  upon 
the  two  or  three  things  that  give  the  poet  his  particular  place  in 
the  poetic  pantheon.  The  first  of  these  is  his  originality.  In 
one  aspect  this  originality  is  more  apparent  than  real.  The 
novel-seeming,  homely  themes,  the  racy  idioms,  the  irregular 
lines,  the  profuse  rhymes,  the  tagged  stanzas,  are  largely 
in  maintenance  of  the  traditions  of  the  northern  folk-poetry. 
But  Burns  gave  them  more  than  a  popular  vogue,  and  they  cut 
sharply  across  the  standard  academic  forms.  Moreover  Burns's 
essential  originality  is  not  for  a  moment  to  be  questioned.  He 
went  straight  to  native  sources,- — to  no  Arcadian  vale  or  Helico- 
nian fount,  but  to  Tarbolton  and  Mauchline,  to  the  Lugar  and 
the  Cessnock.  It  is  not  in  imagination  alone  that  he  sits  by  the 
ingle-cheek  and  eyes  the  upward  curling  smoke,  not  in  a  poem 
alone  that  the  farmer  salutes  his  old  mare  Maggie  on  a  New 
Year's  morning.  We  know  that  Holy  Willie's  name  was  really 
Willie;  that  the  Tarbolton  lassies  lived  there  in  the  neighborhood, 
just  as  they  are  described;  that  Luath  was  his  own  dog;  that  it 
was  an  actual  mouse,  turned  out  of  her  nest  by  the  ploughshare, 
that  he  immortalized  in  pathetic  rhyme.  In  a  word,  Burns  was 
wholly  natural,  and  the  want  of  naturalness  was  the  particular 
curse  under  which  poetry  had  too  long  labored;  let  a  few  such 
voices  as  his  be  once  given  a  fair  hearing  and  the  old  order  of 
things  would  assuredly  pass.  And  in  the  next  and  last  place, 
Burns  was  wholly  lyrical- — ^a  heaven-gifted,  spontaneous,  irre- 
pressible singer.  Every  scene  of  his  life  and  every  feeling  of  his 
heart  turned  to  song  on  his  lips.  Words  marshalled  themselves 
into  tuneful  measures,  and  rhymes  came  trooping  at  call.  Be- 
yond all  special  graces  of  form  and  ever}'  message  that  may  be 
read  in  his  verse,  this  singing  quality  impresses  itself.  Greater 
poets  England  has  had  in  number^ — she  has  had  no  more  perfect 
singer.  And  simultaneously  with  this  reappearance  in  her 
literature  of  the  dialect  of  the  North,  partly  it  may  be  in  con- 
se([uence  of  it,  were  opened  anew  the  floodgates  of  song. 


CHAPTER  XVI 


WOKUSWOKTH 

Chateaubriand 

COLERIDGE 

Pic'hte,  Hegel 

BYRON 

Schlegel 

SHELLEY 

Richter 

KEATS 

Tieck,  Uhland, 

JANE  AUSTEN 

Hoffmann 

SCOTT 

Beethoven 

Leopard! 

Irving,  Cooper 

EARLY   NINETEENTH   CENTURY — AGE   OF  ROMANTICISM 

1798-1832 


Battle  of  the  Nile,  17!)S:  Tra- 
falgar  JSor> 

(Bonaparte  Emperor,  1S04.) 

Abolition  of  Slave  Trade J807 

War  with  the  United  States . .  1812 

Battle  of  Waterloo 1S15 

Accession  of  George  IV. 1820 

Catholic  Emancipation  Act . .  1829 
Accession  of  William  IV 78.90 


With  the  year  1798  we  reach  another  conspicuous  mile- 
post  in  the  history  of  English  literature.  The  term  Augustan, 
which  was  applied  to  the  ages  of  Dryden  and  Pope,  may 
very  properly  be  extended  (as  the  term  Elizabethan  is  often 
extended)  to  cover  a  generation  or  more  that  followed.  But 
we  have  now  reached  the  point  when  this  "Augustan"  era,  the 
long  time  during  which  authority  counted  for  more  than  inspi- 
ration, may  be  pronounced  definitely  closed.  After  the  eigh- 
teenth century,  there  lingered  but  a  single  poet  of  the  slightest 
importance — George  Crabbe — who  preserved  any  trace  of 
reverence  for  the  authority  that  was  so  hopelessly  defunct.  To 
all  intents  and  purposes,  the  death-warrant  of  that  authority 
was  signed  two  years  before  the  century  .ended. 

It  was  the  ultimate  triumph  of  the  spirit  already  referred  to 
as  romanticism,  or  naturalism,  that  brought  this  about.  Men 
somehow  found  themselves  impelled,  at  first  but  fitfully  here 
and  there,  finally  as  if  all  together,  to  speak  out  and  be  natural 
once  more,  to  give  free  rein  to  their  feelings  wheresoever  they 
might  individually  be  led,  whether  to  humanity  and  nature, 
or  to  an  idealized  past,  or  to  regions  of  mystery  beyond  the 

332 


WORDSWORTH  233 

borders  of  the  material  world.  The  springs  of  emotion  were 
once  more  unsealed,  and  poets  went  roving  again  at  will,  "with 
a  free  onward  impulse  brushing  through"  all  trammelling 
rules  and  traditions.  The  movement  had  long  been  gath- 
ering force.  Now  it  crystallized.  Now  it  came,  not  for  the 
first  time  to  self -consciousness — conscious  protests  against  the 
narrower  spirit  have  already  been  recorded — but  now  for  the 
first  time  to  something  like  an  organized  and  steadily  trium- 
phant revolution.  And  as  a  concerted  signal  of  this  revolution, 
appeared,  in  the  year  1798,  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge's  volume 
of  Lyrical  Ballads. 

Wordsworth,  though  not  the  most  immediately  influential, 
was  the  eldest  and   greatest  of   the    poets  who  led  the  revolt. 

Not  much  of  romantic  interest  attaches  to  his 
„.  ,  ,  biography.  He  was  born  among  the  hills  of  Cum- 
1770-1850.    berland,  northwestern  England,  in  the  year  1770. 

From  the  out-of-door  influences  of  sky,  lake,  and 
mountain  he  passed  to  the  academic  atmosphere  of  Cambridge, 
and  from  that  into  the  heated  strife  of  the  Revolution  in  France, 
whence  he  returned  to  England  just  before  the  terrors  of  the 
year  ninety-three.  What  he  saw  and  felt  in  France  had,  how- 
ever, a  profound  influence  upon  his  life  and  character.  In 
spirit,  he  had  flung  himself  ardently  into  the  cause  of  the  revo- 
lutionists, but  he  shrank  in  horror  from  the  violence  which  they 
ultimately  permitted  themselves  and  lapsed  into  a  state  of 
agonizing  disappointment  and  distrust.  The  record  of  the 
effects  of  this  experience,  of  the  deep  spiritual  change  which 
it  worked  upon  his  maturing  manhood,  is  found  in  his  auto- 
biographical poem  of  "the  growth  of  a  poet's  mind,"  The 
Prelude,  written  a  few  years  afterward,  though  not  published 
until  the  year  of  his  death.  At  the  time,  he  retired  to  the  country 
in  company  with  his  sister  Dorothy,  a  woman  to  whose  high 
character  and  lifelong  service  and  inspiration  to  himself  he  has 
gratefully  testified.  Then  began  also  his  friendship  with  Cole- 
ridge, a  slightly  younger  Cambridge  man.     Both  were  living  in 


234 


EARLY   NINETEENTH   CENTURY 


Somersetshire,  and  it  was  in  the  course  of  their  walks  over  the 
Quantock  Hills  that  he  and  Coleridge  discussed  their  novel 
theories  of  poetry  and  resolved  upon  the  joint  publication  of  the 
Lyrical  Ballads.  After  the  volumes  was  issued,  they  went, 
accompanied  by  Dorothy  Wordsworth,  for  a  short  sojourn  in 
Germany,  and  upon  their  return,  Wordsworth  and  his  sister 
repaired  to  their  native  Lake  country  in  the  North.  There, 
except  for  his  frequent  tours  through  the  surrounding  region 
or  abroad,  the  poet  spent  the  remaining  fifty  years  of  his  life, 
first  at  Grasmere  and  later  at  Rydal  Mount,  becoming,  through 
long  residence  and  ever  deepening  sympathy,  like  one  incorpo- 
rate with  the  hills  and  dales. 

The  slowly  matured  and  slowly  published  poetry  of  Words- 
worth's long  life  makes  a  bulky  and  very  uneven  volume.  Only 
the  items  of  major  importance  need  be  enumerated.  Nineteen 
of  the  poems  in  the  Lyrical  Ballads  of  1798  were  his,  among 
them  We  are  Seven  and 
Tintem  Abbey.  To  these, 
several  were  added  in  the 
second  edition,  which  ap- 
peared in  1800.  In  1807, 
followed  a  two-volume  edi- 
tion of  Poems.  Mean- 
while the  posthumously 
printed  Prelude  and  other 
things  had  been  written ;  it 
is  a  commonplace  of  crit- 
icism to  say  that  nearly  all 
his  greatest  poetry  was  written  in  these  early  years.  Later  pub- 
lications that  should  be  mentioned,  however,  were  The  Excursioii, 
1814;  The  White  Doe  of  Rylslone,  1815;  and  especially  The 
River  Duddon  series  of  sonnets,  1819-1820.  He  composed 
little  after  the  year  1835.  His  poetry  was  never  popular,  ius 
that  of  Scott  and  Byron  and  even  many  far  inferior  poets  was. 
But  his  steadfast  adherence  to  principles  which  were  essen- 


■PEELK  CA.STLE  IN  A  STORM. 

{See  M'ordsieurlli'a  Poem) 


WORDSWORTH  235 

tially  sound  and  which  he  felt  confident  would  in  due  time  be 
recognized,  gained  for  him  discerning  admirers  and  friends. 
Coleridge  stood  by  him,  as  did  also  Southey  and  De  Quincey,  who 
made  the  Lake  region  their  home;  Dr.  Arnold  of  Rugby,  and  his 
son,  delighted  to  spend  their  vacations  in  his  neighborhood; 
pilgi'ims,  like  Emerson,  were  drawn  from  afar.  And  on  Southey's 
death  in  1843,  he  received  the  national  honor  of  the  Poet-laure- 
ateship.  By  the  time  of  his  own  death,  seven  years  later,  the 
recognition  thus  gradually  won  had  become  a  secure  renoAvn. 
Wordsworth's  ideas  of  the  functions  of  the  poet  and  the 
theories  with  which  he  set  about  reforming  English  poetry  Avere 

very  definitely  stated  in  the  prose  prefaces  which 
His  Poetic  accompanied  his  poems.  In  the  second  edition  of 
Creed.  the  Lyrical  Ballads  he  declared  that  his  purpose  had 

been  to  take  from  humble  and  rustic  life  situations 
illustrating  the  primary  laws  of  our  nature,  and  to  clothe  them 
throughout  "  in  a  selection  of  language  really  used  by  men/'  at 
the  same  time  giving  them  such  a  coloring  of  imagination  that 
"ordinary  things  should  be  presented  to  the  mind  in  an  un- 
usual aspect."  The  imagination,  he  affirmed,  in  a  letter  to 
Southey  defending  the  poem  of  Peter  Bell,  does  not  require  any 
supernatural  agency,  but  "may  be  called  forth  as  imperiously 
by  incidents  in  the  humblest  departments  of  daily  life."  Simple 
scenes,  truth  to  nature,  simple  diction,  and  imagination, — these 
were  the  fundamental  articles  of  his  creed.  Adherence  to  this 
creed  did  not  always  result  in  good  poetry.  Sometimes,  indeed, 
through  a  want  of  humor,  Wordsworth  wrote  verse  that  in  its 
bald  simplicity  is  little  short  of  ridiculous.  And  sometimes, 
no  doubt,  he  succeeded  best  when  he  lost  sight  of  his  theories; 
for  the  Muse  refuses  to  be  tethered.  But  it  is  nevertheless  true 
that  he  and  his  group  succeeded  in  breaking  down  the  old  tradi- 
tions and  restoring  poetry  to  its  rightful  heritage. 

As  for  his  own  product,  uneven  though  it  proved,  it  con- 
tains not  only  many  poems  of  genuine  inspiration,  but  many 
of  the  very  highest  order;  and  to  the  present  generation  it  is  a 


236  EARLY   NINETEENTH    CENTURY 

matter  of  less  concern  to  know  how  fur  these  were  the  fruit  of 
his  theories  than  to  recognize  their  intrinsic  poetic  worth.  There 
are  the  hnes  on  Tiniern  Abbey,  breathing  the  deep  and  holy 
peace  that  springs  from  a  sense  of  the  interpenetration  of  nature 
and  spirit;  there  are  the  serene  piety  of  the  Ode  to  Duty  and  the 
lofty  philosophy  of  Laodamia;  the  homely,  moving  pathos  of 
Michael  and  The  Affliction  of  Margaret;  and  the  naive  but 
infinite  suggest iveness  of  We  are  Seven;  the  subdued  lyric  rapture 
of  My  Heart  Leaps  up  tvlien  I  Behold,  She  was  a  Phantom  of 
Delight,  and  Daffodils  ("I  wandered  lonely  as  a  cloud"); 
the  haunting  melody  of  The  Solitary  Reaper;  the  fusion  of  sim- 
plicity and  passion  in  the  poems  upon  Lucy;  and  the  union  of 
nearly  all  these  things,  together  with  an  indescribable  effluence 
of  something  besides,  that  marks  as  the  crown  of  his  work  the 
magnificent  Ode  on  the  Intimations  of  Immortality.  To  these 
separate  poems  should  be  added  certain  j)assages  of  The  Excur- 
sion and  The  Prelude,  wherein,  meeting  Milton  on  his  own  high 
ground,  Wordsworth  comes  off  with  no  unequal  honor;  and  the 
best  of  the  sonnets,  such  as  "Earth  has  not  anything  to  show 
more  fair,'  or  "The  world  is  too  much  with  us,"  or  "Two  voices 
are  there,"  or  "I  thought  of  Thee,"  wherein  again  he  need  not 
bow  <lown  before  his  great  exemplar. 

"I  thought  of  Thee,  my  partner  and  my  guide. 
As  being  past  away.— Vain  sympathies  ! 
For,  backward,  Duddon  !  as  I  cast  my  eyes, 
I  see  what  was,  and  is,  and  will  abide; 
Still  glides  the  Stream,  and  shall  forever  glide ; 
The  Form  remains,  the  Function  never  dies; 
While  we,  the  brave,  the  mighty,  and  the  wise. 
We  Men,  who  in  our  morn  of  youth  defied 
The  elements,  must  vanish; — be  it  so  ! 
Enough,  if  something  from  our  hands  have  power 
To  live,  and  act,  and  serve  the  future  hour; 
And  if,  as  toward  the  silent  tomb  we  go. 
Through  love,  through  hope,  and  faith's  transcendent 

dower, 
We  feel  that  we  are  greater  than  we  know." 


WORDSWORTH  237 

It  is   not   hard  to  see  what   it  is  that   has  always   stood 

in  the  way  of   a  popular  acceptance  of  Wordsworth.     Milton's 

three  counts  of  "simple,"  "sensuous,"  and  "passionate,"  may 

each,  in  a  right  interpretation  of  the  terms,  be  affirmed  of  his 

poetry;   yet  there    is  about  nearly  all  of  it  an  austerity  that  is 

at  first  contact  forbidding.     Out  of  the  struggle  against  despair 

which  ensued  upon  the  shattering  of  his  early  hopes  and  dreams, 

he  came,  victorious  indeed,  but  with  an  inevitable  loss 

Austerity,      ^f  enthusiasm.     Reacting  from  the  reaction  of  the 

]■  u  J  age,  he  was  carried  back  toward  conservatism.     He 

live,  exalted     ^  . 

Muse.  schooled  himself  in  repression  and  self-control.   "The 

Gods  approve,"  he  writes  in  Laodamia,  "the  depth, 
and  not  the  tumult,  of  the  soul."  Still  a  devotee  of  high  ideals 
of  liberty  and  the  divinity  of  man,  his  passion  flowed,  not  with 
noisy  surface  fretting,  but  tranquil,  strong,  and  deep.  These 
are  qualities  little  inspiring  to  the  vulgar  or  unphilosophic 
mind,  and  they  make  Wordsworth  distinctly  a  poet  for  mature 
rather  than  youthful  years.  Moreover,  the  compass  of  his  lyre 
is  not  great;  his  verse  has  a  peculiar  and  somewhat  monot- 
onous character.  It  is  neither  dramatic  nor  epic;  nor  will  the 
term  lyric  apply  to  any  extensive  portion  of  it,  though  includ- 
ing much  of  the  very  best.  The  great  body  of  it  is  strictly 
reflective  and  didactic.  It  meditates  and  it  teaches — not  as 
the  rigid,  obvious  moralizing  of  the  eighteenth  century  verse 
teaches,  but  in  its  own  exalted  way.  The  exaltation  is  one  of 
the  distinguishing  marks.  Mr.  Saintsbury  dwells  upon  the  fact 
that  Wordsworth  is  peculiarly  rich  in  "poetic  moments" — 
flashes  of  thought  or  feeling  revealed  in  such  a  sudden  felicity 
of  phrase  that  the  poet  in  every  imaginative  man  must  instan- 
taneously respond.  Such  are,  to  select  only  from  Tintern 
Abbey  and  The  Solitary  Reaper — 

"The  sounding  cataract 
Haunted  nie  like  a  passion;" — 

"The  still,  sad  music  of  humanity;" — 


238  EARLY    NINETEENTH   CENTURY 

"Old,  unhappy,  far-off  things, 
'And  battles  long  ago." 

There  are  unquestionably  more  such  poetic  moments  in 
Wordsworth,  irradiating  the  shorter  poems  and  relieving  the 
dreariest  wastes  of  the  longer,  than  in  all  the  eighteenth  century 
poets  combined. 

But  the  supreme  thing  in  Wordsworth  is  that  which  inspires 

alike  his  didactic  and  his  exalted  moods.     The  one  abiding, 

permeating  quality  of  his  poetry  is  his  religious  sense 

^  of  the  part  which  Nature  plays,  or  should  play,  in 

the  spiritual  life  of  man.     Beyond  all  other  poets 

before  and  since,  he  is  Nature's  high-priest. 

"To  her  fair  works  did  Nature  link 
The  human  .soul  that  through  me  ran." 

"To  me  the  meanest  flower  that  blow.s  can  give 
Thoughts  that  do  often  lie  too  deep  for  tears." 

This  is  no  mere  contemplation  of  the  externally  picturesque, 
.such  as  Thomson  or  Cowper  knew;  nor  e\en  the  abundantly 
more  spontaneous  response  of  Burns  to  the  mute  appeals  of 
earth  and  sky — for  after  all,  Burns's  real  sympathy  was  called 
forth  by  man;  it  is  such  a  .sympathy  with  nature  as  no  Eng- 
lish poet  had  dreamed  of.  It  is  a  convic-tion  that  nature  is  not 
a  thing  apart — "dead,"  as  Lamb  scoffingly  phrased  it — but 
an  integral  j>ortion  of  human  life^  or,  conversely,  that  human  life 
is  an  integral  portion  of  tlie  surrounding  world.  One  law  knits 
all  together,  one  spirit  pervades  all.  And  W^ordsworth  conse- 
crated his  genius  to  the  endeavor  to  restore  to  men — as  he  hero- 
ically spent  the  years  of  his  own  abstinent  life  in  restoring  more 
completely  to  himself — the  power  of  intimate  communion  with 
this  other  part  of  ourselves,  in  order  that  human  life,  so  long 
self-blinded  and  crippled,  might  be  once  again  made  whole. 
He  leads  here  into  a  region  of  mysticism  where  few  will  easily 
follow,  and  where  all  who  fail  will  perhaps  mo.st  wisely  keep 
silent.     But  none  will  deny  that  Wordsworth  has  at  least  deep- 


COLERIDGE  239 

eiiccl  our  i-evereiice  for  a  world  whose  boundaries  he  has  pushe<J 
further  into  the  infinite,  and  enabled  us  to  reach,  through  re- 
quickened  sympathies  with  all  natural  life,  to  exhaustless  sources 
of  delight  and  consolation.  "Time,"  says  Matthew  Arnold, 
one  of  his  truest  disciples, 

"may  restore  us  in  his  course 
Goethe's  sage  mind  and  Byron's  force; 
But  where  will  Europe's  latter  hour 
Again  find  Wordsworth's  healing  power  ?" 

Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge  was  a  nervous  and    somewhat 
erratic  man  who  never  achieved  Wordsworth's  early  won  self- 
mastery  and  into  whose  tempestuous  life  therefore 
t^amuel         never  came  Wordsworth's  spiritual  peace.     He  was 

„  /  .,  born  in  Devonshire,  the  youngest  of  the  thirteen 
Colenage,  .  '  j         t> 

1172-1834.  children  of  the  vicar  of  Ottery  St.  Mary,  and  was 
sent  to  school  at  Christ's  Hospital,  the  "Blue  Coat" 
charity  school  of  London.  He  went  to  Cambridge  in  1791,  just 
as  Wordsworth  had  completed  his  course  there,  but  left  without 
taking  a  degree.  Always  a  dreamer,  and  listening  just  then  to 
the  hurtling  echoes  of  the  French  Revolution  within  his  own 
mind,  he  joined  Robert  Southey  in  a  scheme  to  found  a  com- 
munistic colony — a  "  Pantisocracy,"  or  government  of  all  by  all — 
on  the  banks  of  the  Susquehanna,  an  American  stream  of  which 
they  knew  little  beyond  the  fact  that  it  bore  a  beautiful,  romantic 
name.  It  was  after  his  marriage  and  the  abandonment  of  this 
scheme  that  he  made  his  acquaintance  with  Wordsworth,  an  ac- 
quaintance which  bore  fruit  in  the  Lyrical  Ballads.  It  is  probable 
indeed  that  he,  although  the  younger,  was  the  prime  mover  of 
their  joint  poetic  propaganda;  none  the  less,  the  influence  of  each 
on  the  other  was  at  the  moment  invaluable.  Coleridge's  share 
in  the  volume  consisted  of  four  poems,  with  the  immortal  Ancient 
Mariner  in  the  place  of  honor.  In  this  same  year,  1797-1798, 
he  composed,  it  seems,  the  first  part  of  Chrwtahel,  France:  an  Ode, 
and  Kuhla  Khan  (a  fragment  of  a  remembered  dream);  while 


240  EARLY   NINETEENTH    CENTURY 

Love,  the  second  part  of  Christabel,   and  Dejection:  afi  Ode, 
followed  very  rapidly. 

The  melancholy  part  of  the  story  is  that  here,  so  far  as  great 
poetry  is  concerned,  the  catalogue  ends.  Of  Coleridge's  other 
poetic  fragments,  tragedies,  etc.,  we  need  scarcely  take  account. 
He  went  with  the  Wordsworths  to  Germany,  the  home  of  Kant 
and  transcendental  philosophy,  and  immersed  himself  in  meta- 
physics. He  returned  to  England,  fell  a  victim  to  opium,  lost 
his  powers  of  concentration,  seldom  finishing  anything  he  under- 
took, and  became  dependent  upon  his  friends,  living  for  a  time 
in  the  Lake  country,  but  later  mostly  at  London.  In  1816,  under 
the  care  of  a  physician  with  whom  he  lived  at  Highgate,  his 
faculties  were  somewhat  recuperated.  He  published  the  still 
unfinished  Christabel  and  Kuhla  Khan,  and  he  began  to  produce 
more  prolifically  again,  this  time  chiefly  philosophical  and 
critical  prose.  The  work  was  still  characteristically  fragment- 
ary, as  the  titles  show — Biographia  Literaria,  Notes  on  Shake- 
speare, etc.  But  he  grappled  with  the  highest  speculative  sub- 
jects, such  as  the  nature  of  knowledge  and  the  being  of 
God;  and  in  the  lower  field  of  criticism,  as,  for  instance,  in 
the  notes  on  Shakespeare  and  the  dramatists,  in  his  discussion 
of  Wordsworth's  excellences,  in  his  observations  on  art  and 
nature,  he  gave  utterance  to  dicta  that  in  brilliance  and  depth 
remain  unexcelled.  For  other  distinction,  he  shone  as  a  conver- 
sationalist— a  monologist  rather.  On  his  favorite  subjects  he 
would  talk  for  hours,  and  being  one  of  the  most  omnivorous 
readers  and  best  informed  men  that  ever  lived,  the  character  of 
his  talk  may  be  inferred.  Friends  and  disciples  gathered  to 
listen;  and  Carlyle  has  given  a  famous  description  of  him,  as, 
with  his  bodily  infirmities  and  rapt,  soaring  intellect,  he  sat  and 
talked,  "on  the  brow  of  Highgate  Hill,"  like  some  Olympian 
deity  delivering  laws  and  oracles  to  the  mundane  world.  After 
this  second  period  of  activity  his  physical  health  steadily  declined, 
down  to  his  death  in  1834.  At  the  best,  his  work  seemed  never 
commensurate  with  the  promise  of  his  great  powers.     "To  the 


>VlI-I>IAM    COM'PER 
"W.VI.TKR    SC-OTT 


Robert  Bi-rns* 

SaMIKI.    TaYIX'R    COLERinGE 


COLERIDGE  241 

man  himself,"  said  Carlyle,  "Nature  had  given,  in  high  meas- 
ure, the  seeds  of  a  noble  endowment;  and  to  unfold  it  had  been 
forbidden  him."  "Come  back,"  cried  Lamb,  his  old  school- 
fellow, "come  back  into  memory,  like  as  thou  wert  in  the  day- 
spring  of  thy  fancies,  with  hope  like  a  fiery  column  before  thee — 
the  dark  pillar  not  yet  turned — Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge — Logi- 
cian, Metaphysician,  Bard!" 

The  two  things  that  directly  concern  us  are  the  absolute 

qualities  of  Coleridge's  poetry  and  the  depth  and  extent  of  his 

personal  and  literary  influence.     His  own  deliberately  chosen 

method  of  exciting  poetic  imagination  and  sympa- 

D  V^-  ^  thy  was  very  different  from  Wordsworth's.  Imme- 
Romanticist.    /  ■' 

diate  truth  to  nature  he  did  not  seek;  on  the  contrary, 
he  proposed  to  make  use  of  supernatural  or  romantic  situations 
and  characters,  trying  at  the  same  time  to  transfer  to  them  "a, 
human  interest  and  a  semblance  of  truth."  Just  here  is  the 
enormous  gap  that  separates  him  from  his  friend.  Romanticism, 
which  seemed  to  be  Wordsworth's  only  in  a  remote  and  derivative 
sense,  was  the  very  breath  of  Coleridge's  being.  As  a  poet  and 
as  a  metaphysician,  he  was  a  dreamer,  dwelling  in  a  mist-world 
of  his  own.  Wordsworth  tried  to  assist  in  the  composition  of  the 
Ancient  Mariner,  but  gave  it  up:  those  seas  were  not  for  him  to 
sail  on.  But  Coleridge  put  forth  fearlessly  and  brought  back 
the  golden  freight  we  know — the  strange  tale  of  crime  and  expia- 
tion, of  a  mysterious  voyage  into  spectral  realms  and  a  glad 
return  to  the  world  of  natural  and  moral  beauty. 

"O  Wedding-Guest !  this  soul  hath  been 
Alone  on  a  wide,  wide  sea: 
So  lonely  'twas,  that  God  himself 
Scarce  seemed  there  to  be. 

"O  sweeter  than  the  marriage-feast, 
'Tis  sweeter  far  to  me, 
To  walk  together  to  the  kirk 
With  a  goodly  company  ! — 


242  EARLY    NINETEENTH   CENTURY 

"To  walk  together  to  the  kirk, 
And  all  together  pray, 
While  each  to  his  great  Father  bends, 
Old  men,  and  babes,  and  loving  friends, 
And  youths  and  maidens  gay  I" 

Poetry  that  could  unseal  the  springs  of  wonder  and  reverence 
like  this  was  a  revelation,  and  is  a  revelation  still.  "The  light 
that  never  was,  on  sea  or  land" — the  words  are  Wordsworth's, 
but  the  thing  is  most  eminently  Coleridge's;  and  minuter *char- 
acterization  of  his  poetry  needs  scarcely  to  be  made.  Let  us 
add  mention  only  of  the  music  with  which  his  best  poems  are 
always  vocal — the  rush  and  roll  of  the  odes,  the  intermittent  peals 
and  pauses  of  Christabel,  the  "symphony  and  song"  of  Kubla 
Khan,  and  the  echoing  chimes  of  Youth  ami  Age: — 

"Flowers  are  lovely;  Love  is  flower-like; 
Friendship  is  a  sheltering  tree ; 
O  !  the  joys,  that  came  down  shower-like, 
Of  Friendship,  Love,  and  Liberty, 

Ere  I  was  old." 

The  influence  that  Coleridge  has  exercised  is  far  wider  than 

the  fragmentary  although  splendid  nature  of  his  production 

would  seem  to  promise.     He  talked,  and  the  spread- 

j  „  inff  waves  of  that  "flood  of  utterance,"  as  Carlyle 

Influence.  ^     .  .  .  '  '' 

described  it,  are  spreading  yet.  He  brought  from 
Germany  an  imaginative  idealistic  philosophy,  which,  counter- 
acting the  materialism  of  Locke  and  the  rising  utilitarianism 
of  Bentham  and  Mill,  gave  a  strong  impetus  to  all  that  goes  by 
the  name  of  transcendentalism,  an  impetus  that  was  transmitted 
to  Carlyle,  Emerson,  and  Ruskin.  He  sang,  and,  with  Burns, 
set  all  poets  to  singing  again.  Mechanical  couplets  were  imme- 
diately doomed;  blank  verse,  even,  should  thenceforth  be  free 
as  Shakespeare's  or  cadenced  like  Milton's.  Iambs  could  be 
lightened  at  will. 

"  Bard  Bracy  !  bard  Bracy  !  your  horses  are  fleet, 
Ye  must  ride  up  the  hall,  your  music  so  sweet, 
'      More  loud  than  your  horses'  echoing  feet  !" 


SOLTUEY  243 

He  was  not  the  first  to  employ  anaptests;  they  had  been  used  by 
poets  from  Prior  to  Burns,  and  especially  by  Cowper.  But  by 
combining  anapaests  with  iambs  and  trocnees  in  the  ever  varying 
movement  of  Christabel,  he  restored  the  freedom  of  early  Enghsh 
verse  and  virtually  gave  to  poetry  a  new  metre.  The  influence 
of  this  single  incomplete  but  wonderful  poem,  whether  in  form 
or  spirit,  can  be  felt  in  the  verse  of  almost  every  romantic  poet 
since,  from  Scott  and  Keats,  through  Poe,  Tennyson,  Long- 
fellow, Lowell,  and  even  Arnold,  to  Rossetti  and  Swinburne. 
To  such  fruitfulness  have  the  seeds  of  that  noble  endowment 
unfolded  on  happier  soil. 

With  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge,  Robert  Southey  made  up 
the  trio  of  the  "Lake  Poets."  He  has  already  been  mentioned 
as  having  concocted  with  Coleridge,  his  brother-in- 
Roberl  ]^^.^    ^j^g     "Pantisocratic"     scheme.     After    much 

^^ ^'  wandering  he  settled  down  at  Keswick,  in  the 
Lake  region,  to  the  care  of  his  family  and  Cole- 
ridge's, and  to  the  cheerful  pursuit — for  such  he  found  it — of 
literature.  .Vs  to  poetry,  it  proved  little  more  than  a  pursuit. 
As  early  as  1796  he  published  the  long  blank  verse  poem  of  Joan 
of  Arc,  and  he  continued,  with  astonishing  industry  and  fluency, 
to  WTite  various  'epics"  on  romantic  subjects.  The  Curse  of 
Kehama  (1810)  being  probably  the  best.  Little  of  his  poetry  is 
read  to-day,  save  a  few  minor  pieces  like  the  Battle  of  Blenheim. 
and  the  Cataraet  of  Lodore.  The  very  correct  prose  to  which 
he  applied  himself  in  later  life — histories,  biographies,  etc. — is  of 
more  substantial  merit.  His  Life  of  Nelson  (1813)  is  a  standard 
work.  Southey  was  made  Poet  Laureate  in  1813,  and  he  at 
least  adorned  that  office  more  than  he  was  adorned  by  it,  which 
could  scarcti/  have  been  said  of  any  predecessor  since  Dryden. 

The  credit  for  popularizing  the  romantic  movement  in 
poetry  belongs  mainly  to  Scott,  who  was  precisely  contemf)ora- 
neous  with  these  men,  and  whose  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel 
(1805)  achieved  a  widespread  fame  that  was  never  accorded 
to  the  Lyrical  Ballads.     But  Scott,  being  primarily  a  prose  ro- 


244  EARLY    NINETEENTH   CENTURY 

mancer,  and  showing  in  verse  approximately  the  same  qualities 
that  he  showed  in  prose,  will  be  treated  later.     For  the  moment 

we  must  pass  to  another  Scotch  poet,  Thomas  Camp- 
r  ^^Tn  ^^^^'  ^^^^  ^^^  ®^  ^  Glasgow  merchant,  who  enjoyed  an 
1777-18'"'     almost  equal  popularity.     Campbell  had  published 

in  1799,  when  he  was  only  twenty-one  years  old,  The 
Pleasures  of  Hope,  a  poem  which  was  well  received,  though  it 
was  quite  in  the  old  manner, — couplets,  personification,  didacti- 
cism and  all.  Then,  changing  completely  with  the  sudden 
change  in  taste,  he  produced  his  much  better  work, — the  scarcely 
excelled  war-pieces  of  Hohenlinden,  The  Battle  of  the  Baltic, 
and  Ye  Mariners  of  England,  the  ballads  of  Lochiel  and  Lord 
Ullin's  Daughter,  and  the  romantic  narrative  in  Spenserian 
stanzas,  Gertrude  of  Wyoming  (1809),  which  took  its  scene  and 
name  from  the  valley  of  Wyoming  on  the  Susquehanna.  For 
these,  and  for  a  few  lines  like  "  'Tis  distance  lends  enchantment 
to  the  view,"  or 

"  To  live  in  hearts  we  leave  behind 
Is  not  to  die," 

Campbell  is  still  remembered. 

Yet  another  poet  who  caught  this  romantic  tide  at  its  flood 
was  the  Irish  minstrel,  and  friend  of  Byron    Thomas  Moore. 

An  amiable,  witty,  light-hearted  social  singing-bird, 
j^  Moore  poured  out  his  songs  in  endless  profusion  for 

1779-1862.    a  public   who   paid   liberally   and   demanded  ever 

more — from  the  Odes  of  Anacreon  in  1800,  the  Irish 
Melodies  ("Go  where  glory  waits  thee,"  "  'Tis  the  last  rose  of 
summer,"  etc.)  beginning  in  1807,  and  Lalla  Rookh  in  1817, 
down  to  Odes  upon  Cash,  Com,  and  Catholics  in  1828.  Litera- 
ture, if  this  were  literature,  was  indeed  looking  up  commercially 
since  the  days  of  Johnson,  seeing  that  Moore  could  obtain  for 
the  ten  instalments  of  his  melodies  somewhat  more  than  sixty 
thousand  dollars.  Such  is  the  reward  that  music  commands, 
while  poetry  often  goes  begging.  Moore's  gift  was  almost  wholly 
lyrical  and  sentimental,  and,  it  must  be  added,  by  no  means  Irish, 


BYRON  245 

or  oven  Celtic.  But  it  was  always  melodic.  The  singing  mea.s- 
ures,  anapaests  in  particular,  he  made  himself  easily  master  of. 
What  in  Cowper,  twenty-five  years  earlier,  was  exceptional — 
"The  poplars  are  felled;  farewell  to  the  shade" — becomes  in  his 
verse  a  prevailing  movement: 

"Long,  long  be  my  heart  with  such  memories  filled  ! 
Like  the  vase  iii  which  roses  have  once  been  distilled — 
You  may  break,  you  may  shatter  the  vase  if  you  will, 
But  the  scent  of  the  roses  will  hang  round  it  still. ' ' 

From  the  poets  of  the  northern  I>akes  and  the  melodists  of 
Scotland  and  Ireland,  we  turn  to  a  slightly  younger  group  in  the 
south  who  constitute  the  other  half  of  the  great  con- 
Lord  Byron,  stellation  of  this  age.  The  first  of  these  was  George 
n 88- 1824.  Gordon  Byron,  whose  meteoric  career,  in  the  second 
and  third  decades  of  the  century,  left  such  a  lurid 
trail  across  the  poetic  heavens.  Time  and  the  successive  shocks 
of  other  portents  have  stripped  Byron's  poetry  of  much  of  its  sinis- 
ter glamour,  but  the  strangely  attractive  personality  remains ;  and 
it  is  still  possible  to  imagine  the  feelings  of  the  British  public 
when  first  the  wild  young  lord  drew  upon  himself  their  attention, 
and  held  it,  at  once  terrified  and  fascinated,  by  a  torrent  of  verses 
which  protest,  criticism,  ridicule,  even  process  of  law,  could  not 
avail  to  stem.  Such  violence  was  little  in  keeping  with  English 
traditions,  and  indeed,  once  again,  as  in  the  time  of  Dryden  and 
Pope,  though  with  all  the  difference  that  lies  between  classicism 
and  romanticism,  England's  literature  was  to  exhibit  a  conti- 
nental and  cosmopolitan  scope. 

Byron  was  very  traceably  the  creature  of  his  inheritance  and 
environment.     He  was  born  in  London  the  year  before  the  out- 
break  of   the    French    Revolution.     His  father,    a 

dissolute  army  captain,  died  three  years  later  and 
twnary  i  »  .  .  , 

Spirit.  '^^t  l^i"^  t^  ^"^  ^^^^  ^'  ^  capricious,  hot-tempered, 

over-indulgent  mother.  When  he  was  ten  years 
old  the  death  of  his  grand-uncle,  the  "wicked"  fifth  Lord 
Byron,  made  him  heir  to  the  title  and  to  what  remained  of  the 


246  EARLY   NINETEENTH  CENTURY 

estate  and  family  seat  of  Newstead  Abbey.  He  was  handsome, 
self-willed,  sensitive,  and  proud,  and  he  suffered  physically,  and 
still  more  mentally,  from  a  deformed  foot  which  prevented  him 
from  taking  part  in  most  athletic  sports,  though  he  excelled  in 
riding  and  swimming.  His  schooling  was  obtained  at  Harrow 
and  Cambridge.  While  at  the  latter  place,  and  but  nineteen 
years  of  age,  he  published  a  volume  of  ve»y  poor  verses,  Hours 
of  Idleness  (1807).  The  sharp  attack  upon  this  by  the  Edin- 
hunjh  Review,  a  newly  established  organ  of  criticism,  called 
forth  a  satirical  response  in  his  somewhat  Popean  English  Bards 
and  Seoteh  Reviewers  (1809).  In  the  meantime,  having  left 
Cambridge,  he  was  leading  a  reckless  life  of  dissipation  at 
Xewstead  Abbey  and  at  London,  and  then,  coming  of  age,  and 
having  taken  his  seat  in  the  House  of  Lords,  he  set  out  for  a 
sojourn  in  the  south  of  Europe  which  lasted  two  years. 

The  immediate  fruits  of  this  sojourn  were  the  first  two 
cantos  of  Childe  Harold's  Pilgrimage,  a  partly  autobiographic 
record  of  his  travels,  with  meditations  upon  the  romantic 
land  of  Spain,  then  suffering  under  the  tyranny  of  Napoleon, 
and  upon  Greece,  suffering  likewise  from  the  oppression  of  the 
Turk.  The  poem  Avas  composed  in  Spenserian  stanzas,  with 
an  intentional  tinge  of  archaism  in  the  language.  It  was  pub- 
lished in  1812,  shortly  after  his  return  to  England,  and  Byron 
"awoke  one  morning  to  find  himself  famous."  The  proud, 
picturesque,  melancholy  Childe  was  taken  at  once  to  the  hearts 
of  the  people;  Scott  was  neglected.  Moore,  Campbell,  and 
Rogers  befriended  the  new  poet,  and  London  society  "suffo- 
cated him"  in  its  drawing  rooms.  Under  the  stimulus  of  this 
success,  within  the  next  four  years  he  published  The  Giaour, 
The  Bride  of  Abydos,  The  Corsair,  Lara,  Hebrew  Melodies,  The 
Siege  of  Corinth,  and  Parisina,  mostly  romances  in  the  metres 
which  Scott  had  already  established  in  favor,  supplanting  how- 
ever Scott's  Highland  chieftams  and  scenery  with  pirates  and 
slaves  and  a  wealth  of  Oriental  coloring  brought  from  his  travels. 
Then  came  his  unfortunate  marriage  with  Miss  Milbanke,  a 


BYRON 


247 


separation,  for  whatever  cause,  and  the  consequent  public  execra- 
tion of  the  poet;  and  in  1816  he  sailed  again  for  the  continent, 
never,  as  the  sequel  proved,  to  return  in  life. 

The  eight  years  that  followed  were  years  of  reckless  wan- 
dering and  feverish  composition.  The  main  events  were  his 
residence  at  Venice,  his  intimacy  with  the  Countess  Guiccioli 
at  Ravenna,  and  his  friendship  with  Shelley  at  Pisa.  These 
were  the  years  of  nearly  aP  his  poetry  of  high  merit — The 
Prisoner  of  ChUlon  (1816),   Beppo,   Mazeppa,   the  third   and 


THE  CASTLE   OF  CIULL.O?*. 


fourth  cantos  of  Childe  Harold  (1816,  1818),  Manfred,  Sarda- 
napalus,  Cain,  and  other  dramas,  the  scathing,  and  in  many 
eyes  profane,  political  satire,  TJie  Vision  of  Judgment,  and  the 
sixteen  cantos  of  the  never  completed  Don  Juan  (1819-1824). 
Even  this  astonishing  productiveness  did  not  suffice  to  drain 
energies  that  are  scarcely  to  be  matched  outside  of  the  Eliza- 
bethan age.  In  the  summer  of  1823  he  went  from  Genoa  with 
a  supply  of  arms,  medicines,  and  money  to  aid  the  Greeks  in 
their  struggle  for  independence.  Had  a  kinder  fate  permitted 
him  to  lead  an  army  into  the  field,  he  would  doubtless  have 


248  EARLY   NINETEENTH    CENTURY 

done  it  with  the  warUke  fearlessness  of  his  ancestors  and  a  poet's 
passion  for  freedom.  But  it  was  not  to  be.  He  was  stricken 
with  fever  at  Missolonghl,  where  he  died  in  April,  1824;  and 
the  boy  Tennyson,  who  linked  that  generation  so  nearly  to 
our  own,  dreaming  at  Somersby  on  poetic  greatness,  and,  like  all 
England,  stunned  by  the  news,  crept  away  to  weep  and  carve 
upon  sandstone  the  words  "Byron  is  dead." 

That  much  of  Byron's  voluminous  verse  is  poetry  of  the 
first  order,  or  that  most  of  it  is  poetry,  in  any  true  sense,  few 

will  maintain.  He  has  abundant  fire,  force,  passion, 
Lharac  vr  of  j.pjgjj(jQj. — ^   dozen   striking    qualities — but   nearly 

always  without  the  indefinable  something  that 
sanctifies  and  saves  for  all  time.  Very  rarely — perhaps  here  and 
there  in  a  song  like  She  Walks  in  Beauty,  or  in  The  Dream  and 
Darkness,  two  poems,  however,  which  suffer  because  Byron 
was  not  a  perfect  master  of  blank  verse — does  he  scale  the 
heights  of  imagination  or  catch  a  glimpse  of  that  "light  that 
never  was,''  "the  consecration,  and  the  Poet's  dream,"  which 
visited  the  eyes  of  the  four  poets  who  stood  by  his  side.  This 
may  be  put  in  another  way  by  saying  that  he  is  almost  wholly 
of  the  earth,  with  nothing  in  him  of  the  transcendental.  Nor 
as  a  mere  artist,  except  on  the  inferior  plane  of  satire  and  bur- 
lesque, does  he  often  show  himself  a  forger  of  the  perfectly 
felicitous  phrase.  He  has  descriptive  passages  of  enticing 
beauty,  pure  and  delicate,  or  warm  and  voluptuous,  as  more 
than  one  canto  of  Don  Juan  testifies. 

"They  were  alone,  but  rtot  alone  as  they 

Who  shut  in  chambers  think  it  loneliness; 
The  silent  ocean,  and  the  starlight  bay. 

The  twilight  glow,  which  momently  grew  less. 
The  voiceless  sands,  and  dropping  caves,  that  lay 

Around  them,  made  them  to  each  other  press, 
As  if  tliere  were  no  life  beneath  the  sky 
Save  theirs,  and  that  their  life  could  never  die." 
(Canto  II.,  st.  clxxxviii.) 


BYRON  249 

None  who  have  fallen,  at  the  right  time  of  life,  under  the  spell 
of  such  passages  as  this,  or  such  as  "Ave  Maria!  blessed  be  the 
hour"  will  ever  recant  from  their  allegiance  to  the  poet  that  was 
in  Byron.  And  on  certain  obviously  poetic  themes,  such  as 
freedom,  the  ruins  of  time,  the  sublime  aspects  of  nature,  the 
transitoriness  of  human  glory,  he  rises  again  and  again  into 
magnificent  declamation. 

"Yet,  Freedom  !  yet  thy  banner,  torn,  but  flying, 
Streams  like  the  thunderstorm  against  the  wind  " 

"The  Niobe  of  nations  !  there  she  stands. 
Childless  and  crownless  in  her  voiceless  woe." 

"Not  from  one  lone  cloud, 
But  every  mountain  now  hath  found  a  tongue. 
And  Jura  answers,  through  her  misty  shroud. 
Back  to  the  joyous  Alps,  who  call  to  her  aloud  !" 

These  lines  show  that  Byron  appeals  to  a  more  exalted,  if  not 
always  to  a  healthier,  imagination  than  does  Scott.  Yet  in  even 
these  unforgetable  passages  of  Childe  Harold,  in  the  impetuous 
narrative  rush  of  Mazeppa,  in  the  lyric  fervor  of  TJie  Isles  of 
Greece,  in  the  phantasmagorial  limnings  of  Darkness  itself, 
there  is  an  unmistakable  note  of  the  rhetorical,  as  distinct  from 
the  true  sublime.  It  is  magnificent  and  one  is  fascinated  by 
it — awed  almost  into  silence — yet  one  feels  that  it  is  not  su- 
premely great.  Moreover  Byron  was  a  fluent,  reckless  versi- 
fier, forcing  or  following  rhymes  as  he  pleased,  and  turning 
off  his  stanzas  by  reams.  The  abuse  of  license,  the  defects  of 
style  and  finish,  the  cynical  bathos,  that  make  so  much  of  liis 
verse  not  poetry  at  all,  will  often  creep,  or  even  be  defiantly 
thrust,  into  a  beautiful  or  lofty  passage,  and  there  comes  the 
sudden  drop,  the  irrecoverable  loss  of  rapport,  that  chills  the 
most  generous  admiration. 

Such  are  the  strictures  which  sober  criticism  is  bound  to 
make.  Even  then,  the  merits  that  have  already  been  conceded 
are  so   many  and   of  such  compelling  power  that,  were  there 


250  EARLY   NINETEENTH   CENTURY 

nothing  more,  they  would  give  Byron  high  poetic  rank.     But 
something  still  more  vital  than  the  (lualities  of  his  poetry  is  to 
be  found  in  the  personality  of  the  man.     Rarely  has 
His  Person-  ^  ^^^^  p^j  himself  so  unreservedly  into  his  work. 
ality,  Sin- 
cerity, and       "Yet  must  I  think  less  wildly:  I /tare  thought 
Strength.  Too  long  and  darkly,  till  my  brain  became, 

In  its  own  eddy  boiling  and  o'crwrought, 
A  whirling  gulf  of  phantasy  and  flame ; 
And  thus,  untaught  in  youth  my  heart  to  tame. 
My  springs  of  life  were  poison'd.     'Tis  too  late  ! 
Yet  am  I  changed;  though  still  enough  the  same 
In  strength  to  bear  what  time  cannot  abate, 
And  feed  on  bitter  fruits  without  accusing  Fate." 

"I  live  not  in  myself,  but  I  become 
Portion  of  that  around  me ;  and  to  nip 
High  mountains  are  a  feeling,  but  the  hum 
Of  human  cities  torture ;  I  can  see 
Nothing  to  loathe  in  Nature,  save  to  be 
A  link  reluctant  in  a  fleshly  chain, 
Class'd  among  creatures,  when  the  soul  can  flee, 
And  with  the  sky,  the  peak,  the  heaving  plain 
Of  ocean,  or  the  stars,  mingle,  and  not  in  vain." 
{Childe  Harold,  III.,  vii.,  Ixxii.) 

Byron  felt  intensely,  and  he  always  wrote  just  what  he  felt. 
The  result  is  an  absolutely  faithful  transcript  of  a  vigorous,  j)ic- 
turesque  personality,  silhouetted  sharp  against  the  neutral  colors 
of  Georgian  British  society.  It  was  as  if  a  volcano  had  been 
upheaved  in  the  valley  of  the  Thames,  filled  with  dangerous  ex- 
plosive forces.  The  poet,  with  his  pride  and  his  passions, 
found  himself  at  hopeless  odds  with  the  decency  and  conformity 
about  him,  and  he  revenged  himself  by  attacking  the  hypocrisy 
that  only  too  often  lay  beneath.  His  Don  Juan,  with  its  liber- 
tine, jjagan  hero,  is  one  long  mocking  satire  that  outraged,  as  it 
was  meant  to  do,  all  the  better  feelings  of  conservative  England. 
Society  had  ostracised  him,  and  he  pilloried  society;  and  he 
never  did  better  work  than  when  he  threw  his  soul  into  this 
congenial  task.     The  spectacle  is  not  edifying,  but  the  brilliance 


BYRON  251 

of  the  feat  and  the  genuis  of  the  agent  are  not  to  be  diseounted. 
"Colossal  egotism"  is  often  charged  against  him,  and  he  did 
indeed  thinly  mask  himself  beneath  all  his  heroes.  He  made 
an  inordinate  and  unheroic  outcry  over  his  own  miseries,  like  an 
over-sensitive  boy,  fancying  himself  a  being  by  nature  set  apart 
and  by  men  misunderstood  and  maligned.  "What  helps  it 
now,"  asks  Matthew  Arnold, 

"that  Byron  bore, 
With  haughty  scorn  that  mock'd  the  smart, 
Through  Europe  to  the  ^tolian  shore 
The  pageant  of  his  bleeding  heart  ?" 

But  just  because  he  had  this  huge  self-pity,  and  played  upon 
and  pleaded  it,  his  poetry  is  what  it  is.  Poetry  may  have  higher 
missions  than  to  voice  a  sorrow  or  to  impale  a  wrong,  yet  to  do 
these  fearlessly  and  effectually  is  one  kind  of  greatness.  Be- 
sides, destructive  forces  have  their  uses.  The  lightning  illumi- 
nates, though  it  blasts  where  it  strikes.  The  illumination  may 
save  from  an  abyss;  the  very  blasting  may  prepare  for  a  sturdier 
growth.  It  was  better  that  England  should  have  her  Byron 
than  a  French  Revolution;  and  though  it  h  too  much  to  say 
that  the  one  saved  her  from  the  other,  the  pertinence  of  the 
illustration  is  not  impaired. 

Historically,  then,  rather  than  as  an  actual,  present  influ- 
ence, Byron  holds  his  position.  He  was  of  his  place  and  time, 
mirroring  in  himself  the  world  that  was,  with  no  hour  wasted  in 
Utopian  dreams.  He  lived  amid  concrete  realities,  and  died 
fighting  for  no  poetic  Lihertas,  but  for  a  political  fact.  On  the 
continent  of  Europe,  indeed,  his  potency  is  not  yet  past.  He 
was,  as  has  been  intimated,  more  European  than  British.  The 
revolutionists  of  the  continent,  the  men  with  swords  in  their 
hands,  welcomed  him  to  their  side.  He  was  the  living  voice  of 
their  hatreds  and  their  desires.  The  poets  flocked  to  his  stand- 
ard— in  France,  Spain,  Italy,  Russia,  Poland.,  Next  to  Shake- 
speare, and  perhaps  more  vitally  than  Shakespeare,  he  is  still 


252  EARLY    NINETEFATII    CENTURY 

for  these  nations  the  great  English  poet.  In  "thr  holy  alliance 
of  poetry  with  the  cause  of  the  people,"  said  Mazzini,  "he  led 
the  genius  of  Britain  on  a  pilgrimage  through  Europe;"  and 
through  Heine,  Leopardi,  Hugo,  de  Musset,  and  their  romantic 
successors,  the  pilgrimage  goes  on. 

The  name  of  Percy  Bysshe  Shelley  is  sometimes  linked  with 
that  of  Byron  as  another  poet  of  social  revolt,  since  he  likewise 
carried   his   revolutionary  doctrines  into  fields  but 
jf^'^y  vaguely  dreamed  of  in  the  milder,  sesthetic  apostasy 

Shelley  ^^  Coleridge  and  Wordsworth.    But  there  all  likeness 

1192-1822.  between  the  two  ends.  Byron,  unlike  any  other  gfeat 
poets  of  the  time,  was  an  uncompromising  realist. 
Shelley,  not  unlike  others,  but  in  a  manner  so  far  beyond  them 
that  the  name  seems  to  apply  to  him  alone,  was  an  idealist. 
Byron  continued  to  the  bitter  end  in  the  storm  and  stress  of 
life,  Wordsworth  found  a  refuge  in  communion  with  Nature, 
Coleridge  wrapped  himself  in  the  mists  of  metaphysical  specu- 
ation,  while  Shelley  was  forever  "on  tiptoe  for  a  flight"  to  the 
radiant  heaven  of  his  dreams. 

In  Shelley's  life,  however,  was  no  lack  of  storm  and  stress. 
He  came  of  a  good  Sussex  family  and  was  the  prospective  heir 
to  a  title;  but  he  seems  to  have  inherited  nothing  from  his 
most  unpoetical  parents  unless  it  were  his  mother's  beauty. 
At  Eton,  where  he  was  sent  to  school,  his  disposition  to  rebel 
against  petty  tyranny,  his  sensitiveness,  his  sohtary  habits,  and 
his  enthusiasms,  won  for  him  the  name  of  "mad  Shelley."  At 
Oxford  he  divided  his  time  among  poetry,  philosophy,  and 
experimental  chemistry  and  physics,  until,  under  the  influence 
of  the  radical  ideas  set  afloat  by  such  books  as  Godwin's  Political 
Justice,  he  published  a  tract  on  The  Necessity  of  Atheism  and 
was  promptly  expelled;  nor  would  his  father  receive  him  at 
home.  Then,  although  but  nineteen  years  of  age,  he  married 
Harriet  Westbrook,  who  was  herself  a  mere  schoolgirl.  The 
marriage  was  apparently  somewhat  against  his  inclination,  and 
certainly  against  his  theory  that  true  love  should  be  the  only 


SHELLEY  253 

bond  of  wedlock.  After  their  separation  the  unfortunate 
Harriet  drowned  herself,  and  Shelley  was  refused  by  law  the 
custody  of  their  two  children.  Meanwhile  he  had  wandered, 
with  Harriet  at  first,  over  the  picturesque  portions  of  northern 
and  western  England  and  Wales,  crossing  several  times  to  Ire- 
land, where  he  distributed,  to  little  purpose,  one  of  his  well- 
meant  socialistic  tracts.  After  Harriet's  death,  in  1816,  he 
married  Mary  WoUstonecraft,  the  daughter  of  Godwin,  with 
whom  he  had  already  eloped  to  the  continent.  In  the  same 
year  he  followed  Byron  to  Italy,  like  him  leaving  England 
never  to  return.  In  Italy  his  happiness  was  clouded  by  the 
loss  of  two  of  the  children  of  his  second  marriage,  the  third  only 
surviving  him.  In  the  summer  of  1822,  with  two  friends,  Tre- 
lawny  and  Williams,  he  took  a  summer  house  on  the  Gulf  of 
Spezia  and  procured  the  pleasure-boat  which  brought  him 
and  Williams  their  death.  After  sailing  from  Leghorn,  whither 
they  had  gone  to  meet  Leigh  Hunt,  the  boat  was  never 
seen  again.  Shelley's  body,  washed  ashore  with  volumes  of 
Sophocles  and  Keats  in  the  pockets  of  the  coat,  was  burned  on 
the  beach  in  the  presence  of  Trelawny,  Byron,  and  Hunt,  and 
the  ashes  were  sent  to  Rome  to  lie  in  the  Protestant  cemetery 
by  the  body  of  his  son,  and  not  far  from  that  of  Keats. 

Generous   and  enthusiastic  dreamer  that  he  was,  Shelley 
spent   much  of  his  life  in  attempts  to   relieve  the  oppressed 

and  to  inspire   men   with   his   own   lofty    ideas   of 
I  W    k     ^^ligi*^'^  ^^^  of  political  and  social  right.     Dying, 

however,  before  he  was  thirty,  he  had  scarcely  time 
to  outgrow  the  mistakes  of  his  juvenile  ardor,  and  the  natural 
results  of  his  defiance  of  authority  and  convention  are  seen  in 
some  of  the  disasters  that  attended  his  brief  career.  But  he 
never  grew  cynical,  like  Byron.  He  did  not  allow  his  personal 
sufferings  to  embitter  him  against  his  kind,  even  when  men 
refused  most  obstinately  to  see  that  a  passionate  love  for  them 
was  his  guiding  motive.  The  love  triumphed  over  hate;  and 
when  practical  measures  failed,  the  poet  in  him  found  relief  in 


254  EARLY    NINETEENTH    ("ENTURY 

song.  We  need  not  stop  to  consider  his  youthful  romances 
nor  the  "philosophical  poem"  of  Queen  Mab  (1813).  In 
Alastor  (1816)  he  first  set  forth  in  the  plenitude  of  poetic  glory 
the  unattainable  ideal  of  human  perfection  that  haunted  his 
dreams.  Alastor,  the  spirit  of  solitude,  is  made  to  pursue, 
through  the  wilds  of  nature  and  the  ruins  of  man,  into  far  cav- 
erns of  the  East,  the  "veiled  maid,"  only  to  resign  to  death  at 
last  his  soul  and  his  "wondrous  frame" — 

"A  fragile  lute,  on  whose  harmonious  strings 
The  breath  of  heaven  did  wander." 

The  Revolt  of  Islam  (Loon  and  Cythna,  1818),  a  long  poem  in 
Spenserian  stanzas,  conveys  .in  a  kind  of  romance  the  poet's 
ideals  of  the  social  millenium  that  would  follow  upon  the  estab- 
lishment of  universal  principles  of  justice  and  love.  Again,  in 
the  lyrical  drama  of  Prometheus  Unbound  (1820),  is  given  a 
vision  of  humanity  redeemed  through  the  efforts  of  a  godlike 
saviour. 

"Love,  from  its  awful  throne  of  patient  power 
In  the  wise  heart,  from  the  last  giddy  hour 

Of  dread  endurance,  from  the  slippery,  steep. 
And  narrow  verge  of  crag-like  agony,  springs 
And  folds  over  the  world  its  healing  wings.     .     ,     . 

"To  defy  Power  which  seems  omnipotent; 
To  love,  and  bear;  to  hope  till  Hope  creates 
From  its  own  wreck  the  thing  it  contemplates; 

Neither  to  change,  nor  falter,  nor  repent; 
This,  like  thy  glory,  Titan,  is  to  be 
Good,  great,  and  joyous,  beautiful  and  free; 
This  is  alone  Life,  Joy,  Empire,  and  Victory!  " 

These,  with  the  more  earthly  tragedy  of  The  Cenci  (1819),  and 
another  lyrical  drama,  Hellas  (1822),  comprise  his  most  impor- 
tant long  poems.  Among  the  briefer  ones  are  the  fantasies  of 
The  Witch  of  Atlas  and  Epipsychidion  (1821),  and  the  elegy 
upon  the  death  of  Keats,  Adonais  (1821),  a  poem  that  stands 
by  the  side  of  Milton's  Lycidas,     In  addition,  there  is  a  lai^e 


SHELLEY  255 

number  of  .short  lyrics,  including  among  them  not  only  his  best 
known  poems  but  some  of  the  most  perfect  productions  of  the 
kind  in  the  language. 

If,  in  judging  this  poetry,  we  put  entirely  aside  its  some- 
what vague  and  never  realized  messianic  purpose,  we  see  at 

once  that  it  possesses,  from  first  to  last,  that  su- 
P        Q-        premely  poetic  quality  for  which  in  Byron  we  so  often 

seek  in  vain.  Always  beyond  definition  or  analysis, 
this  quality  is  nowhere  more  so  than  in  Shelley,  and  the  vocabu- 
lary of  the  empyrean — "radiant,"  "iridescent,"  "ethereal," 
"celestial,"  "angelical" — ^has  been  exhausted  in  the  endeavor  to 
describe  his  work.  Less  elusive,  however,  than  the  tenuous  sub- 
stance of  his  poetry,  or  its  dissolving  cloud-and-light-imagery, 
is  its  wonderful  harmony  of  sound,  and  by  virtue  of  this  it  has 
found  an  audience  both  fit  and  not  hopelessly  few.  It  is  this, 
largely,  that  lifts  the  choruses  of  his  Prometheus  Unbound  and 
Hellas  above  the  level  of  the  dramas  themselves,  and  sets  his 
songs  and  odes — The  Cloud,  To  a  Skylark,  Ode  to  the  West  Wind, 
To  Naples,  To  Liberty — apart  among  English  poems,  the  peers 
of  the  richest  harmonies  of  the  ancient  Lesbian  and  Sicilian 
lyres. 

"I  am  the  daughter  of  Earth  and  Water, 

And  the  nursUng  of  the  sky; 
I  pa.ss  through  the  pores  of  the  ocean  and  shores; 

I  change,  but  I  cannot  die. 
For  after  the  rain,  when  with  never  a  stain 

The  pavilion  of  heaven  is  bare, 
.\nd  the  winds  and  sunbeams  with  their  convex  gleams 

Build  up  the  blue  dome  of  the  air, 
I  .silently  laugh  at  my  own  cenotaph, 

And  out  of  the  caverns  of  rain, 
Like  a  child  from  the  womb,  like  a  ghost  from  the  tomb, 

I  arise  and  unbuild  it  again." 

(The  Cloud.) 

Shelley  did  not  find  his  audience  at  once.     He  did  not  live, 
like  Wordsworth,  to  create  it,  and  he  had  to  be  content  with  the 


256  EARLY    NINETEENTH    CENTURY 

appreciation  of  a  few  kindred  spirits.  His  music  only,  we  have 
said,  could  reach  the  general  ear,  and  even  this,  holding,  as  it 
does,  "like  woven  sounds  of  streams  and  breezes,  the  inmost 
sense  suspended  in  its  web,"  can  never  be  a  universal  passport. 
But  after  his  death  and  Byron's,  Byron's  dominion  over  tht 
British  public  steadily  waned,  while  Shelley's  little  light  as 
steadily  brightened  to  a  star  of  the  first  magnitude.  Time  is 
making  a  juster  discrimination,  and  now  we  behold  them, 
equal  stars  in  that  great  constellation,  the  one  still  shining  with 
a  baleful  light,  the  other  with  a  softer  effulgence. 

Of  the  five  poets  of  this  period  whom  we  are  now  accustomed 
to  name  in  one  breath,  John  Keats  was  the  latest  born  and  the 
first  to  die.  In  fact,  if  we  take  them  in  the  order  of 
'  ^^^^^»  ^^  ^^^  been  done  here — Wordsworth,  Cole- 
ridge, Byron,  Shelley,  Keats — we  may  observe  that 
it  is  the  inverse  order  of  their  deaths,  the  life  of  each  being 
wholly  comprised  within  that  of  his  predecessor.  The  shrinking 
proceeds  at  a  startling  pace.  Briefer  even  than  Shelley's  brief 
life,  the  years  of  Keats  were  fewer  than  a  third  of  Wordsworth's, 
and  his  total  period  of  productiveness  less  than  one-tenth.  He 
died  too  with  no  assurance,  not  even  self-assurance,  of  fame. 
He  had  passed,  like  any  casual  songster,  beneath  the  critical 
eyes  of  the  two  elders,  with  no  premonition  on  the  part  of  either 
that  his  seat  would  be  with  theirs  in  the  end. 

His  birth  was  humble.  He  was  the  son  of  a  London  stable- 
keeper,  orphaned  early,  with  little  more  than  sufficient  means 
for  some  irregular  schooling,  and  soon  put  into  the  distasteful 
position  of  a  surgeon's  apprentice.  His  figure  was  unprepos- 
sessing— he  was  dwarfish,  with  short  legs,  disproportionately 
long  arms  and  broad  shoulders,  and  a  heavy  jaw;  fighting  was 
one  of  his  earliest  accomplishments.  Except,  however,  in  the 
overwhelming  misfortune  of  his  swift  decline  in  health,  it  would 
be  idle  to  contrast  his  worldly  advantages  unfavorably  with  By- 
ron's and  Shelley's.  He  had  compensations.  Even  his  features, 
with  the  large  bright  eyes  and  curling  hair,  were  not  unbeautiful. 


jAiUU  RVRrtX 

Percv  IlYHsiti:  Shelley 


WlI-KIAM    AVOKI>!SWORTH 


KEATS 


257 


And  he  had  the  good  fortune  to  fall  in  with  friends — Charles 
Cowden  Clarke  and  Leigh  Hunt  especially — who  opened  to  him 
inspiring  visions  of  "western  islands"  and  "the  realms  of  gold." 
This  was  when  he  was  between  fifteen  and  twenty.  The  rest 
of  his  brief  story  is  only  first  the  joy  of  life  and  love  and 
poetry,  and  then  the  bitterness  of  seeing  life,  love,  and  poetry 
go  down  together,  apparently  into  one  grave  of  hopeless  extinc- 
tion. First  we  see  him  "ramping"  through  the  Faerie 
Queene,  the  Mneid,  the  Classical  Dictionary,  and  kindred 
sources  of  poetic  delight,  and  trying  his  own  hand  in  verses  on 
all  sorts  of  subjects;  roaming  meanwhile  over  England,  from 
Margate,  Devon,  and  the  Isle  of  Wight,  to  the  Lake  Country 
arid  the  land  of  Bums.  "I  find,"  he  wrote  in  these  months  of 
enthusiasm,  "that  I  cannot  exist  without 
Poetry — without  eternal  Poetry.  ...  I 
began  with  a  little,  but  habit  has  made 
me  a  Leviathan."  Then,  following  close 
upon  the  publication  of  his  first  volumes, 
which  were  so  :icornfully  treated  by  the 
reviewers,  came  his  consuming  passion 
for  Fanny  Brawne,  to  be  followed  in 
turn  by  the  sudden  arrest  which  con- 
sumption brought  to  all  his  hopes  and 
plans.  Though  in  the  heyday  of  life 
in  1818,  with  overflowing  animal  spirits 
and  boundless  poetic  dreams,  we  find 
him  in  the  autumn  of  1820  taking  a  last 
farewell  of  England,  poetry,  and  love  in 
the  most  pathetic  sonnet  in  literature, 
"  Bright  star!  would  T  were  steadfast  as 
thou  art." 

He  died  at  Rome   in  February,  1821^ 

and  was  buried  there  in  the  Protestant 

cemetery,  with    his  own  despairing   words    carved   upon    his 

tombstone:   "Here  lies  one  who.se    name  was  writ  in  water." 


KKAXS'S     GRAVE. 


258  EARLY   NINETEENTH   CENTURY 

Shelley,  under  the  mistaken  impression  that  he  had  been  vir- 
tually killed  by  the  reviewers — whose  attacks  could  cause  little 
more  than  a  passing  irritation  to  one  of  Keats's  mental  strength 
and  sanity — began  at  once,  with  his  magnanimous  Adonais, 
to  reverse  the  verdict  of  the  epitaph,  until  half  a  century  later 
Rossetti  could  truthfully  say  of  that  name  that  it  is 

"not  writ 
But  rumored  in  water,  while  the  fame  of  it 
Along  Time's  flood  goes  echoing  evermore." 

Keats  published  three  volumes  in  all — Poems  in  1817, 
Endymion  (somewhat  ominously  inscribed  "to  the  memory  6f 
Thomas  Chatterton")  in  1818,  and  Lamia,  Isabella,  The  Eve 
of  St.  Agnes,  and  Other  Poems  in  1820.  In  these  four  years  his 
work  was  done.  No  close  student  of  it  can  fail  to  be  impressed 
by  the  astonishing  progress,'  the  rapid  maturing  of  the  poet's 
powers,  which  it  exhibits.  Aside  from  the  perfection  of  the 
imaginative  sonnet  of  discovery,  On  first  Looking  into  Chap- 
man's Homer,  the  early  volume  contains  almost  nothing  that 
is  not  decidedly  juvenile.  Endymion  (in  which  students  of 
form  may  study  the  romantic  as  opposed  to  the  classic  cduplet) 
stands  midway  between  juvenility  and  maturity.  It  gives  assur- 
ance of  the  power  of  sustained  flight,  and  it  reveals  an  opulence 
of  poetic  resources  that  is  actually  dazzling — a  "bare  circum- 
stance" expanded  into  four  thousand  lines,  and  every  line,  in 
the  words  in  which  Keats  declared  his  intention,  "filled  with 
poetry."  But  its  lavish  use  of  ornament  is  the  defect  that  shows 
its  juvenility;  it  surfeits  with  sweets.  Now  in  a  tangle  of  flowers 
and  bowers,  now  in  a  kaleidoscopic  whirl  of  classical  allusions, 
the  story  quite  loses  itself,  and  it  is  possible  to  find  a  little  excuse 
for  the  criticism  that  advised  the  poet  to  go  back  to  his  "plasters, 
pills,  and  ointment-boxes."  But  though  Endymion  is  not  a 
good  poem,  it  is  everpvhere  admirable  poetry,  and  it  is,  more- 
over, not  an  unfitting  base  upon  which  to  have  reared  that 
monumental  first  line, 

"A  thing  of  beauty  is  a  joy  forever." 


KEATS  259 

But  it  is  ill  the  third  volume,  together  with  several  posthu- 
mous pieces,  that  we  find  the  great  Keats,  whether  it  be  in  the 
Miltonic  majesty  of  Hyperion,  the  Greek  purity  and  brightness 
of  Lamia,  the  Italian  softness  of  the  plaintive  Isabella,  the 
mediaeval  witchery  of  the  Eve  of  St.  Agnes,  the  classic  finish, 
the  depth  of  melody,  and  the  concentration  of  passion  in  the 
two  great  Odes,  or  the  essence  of  all  life  and  romance  in  La  Belle 
Dame  Sans  Merci.  In  the  Eve  of  St.  Agnes,  for  instance,  we 
have  the  romantic  lavishness  brought  just  within  bounds, 
charging  the  poem  with  color  and  sound  and  yielding  line  after 
line  that  almost  pain  the  sense  with  beauty— 

"The  music,  yearning  like  a  God  in  pain," — - 

"And  still  she  slept  an  azure-lidded  sleep," — - 

"Ethereal,  flush'd,  and  like  a  throbbing  star,"— 

yet  remaining  subordinate  always  to  the  story,  through  which 
we  are  carried  with  unwavering  interest  and  sympathy  to  the 
close.  In  the  Ode  to  a  Nightingale  we  get  a  deeper  note  of  per- 
sonal passion,  in  the  Ode  on  a  Grecian  Urn  a  more  chiselled, 
stately  perfection  of  controlled  art,  and  in  both  the  same  ex(|ui- 
site  melody  and  imagery  and  the  same  absolute  felicity  of  line 
and  phrase. 

"Darkling  I  listen;  and,  for  many  a  time 

I  have  been  half  in  love  witli  easeful  Death, 
Call'd  him  soft  names  in  many  a  mused  rhyme. 

To  take  into  the  air  my  quiet  breath ; 
Now  more  than  ever  seems  it  rich  to  die, 
To  cease  upon  the  midnight  with  no  pain, 

While  thou  art  pouring  forth  thy  soul  abroad 
In  such  an  ecstasy  ! 
Still  wouldst  thou  sing,  and  I  have  ears  in  vain— 

To  thy  high  requiem  become  a  sod." 

Keats's  happy  hours  were  all  spent  in  fostering  his  love  of 
beauty,  and  his  whole  mission  and  message  was  to  instil  into 
others  the  same  love.  Not  often  does  he  attempt  to  teach 
directly,  but  better  than  any  amount  of  analysis  or  moralizing 


260  EAELT  NINETEENTH   CENTURY 

are  the  poems  themselves.  What  succeeding  poets  owe  to  him 
— for  more  than  any  of  the  others,  even  Shelley  or  Coleridge, 
Keats  is  the  progenitor  of  the  later  romantic  and  aesthetic  poets — 
might  possibly  be  estimated  with  some  approach  to  exactness; 
but  what  the  woHd  of  readers  owes  to  him,  whom  they  know  so 
much  better  than  the  others,  admits  of  no  calculation.  Nor 
is  it  of  any  use  to  conjecture  what  more  he  might  have  accom- 
plished with  a  happier  fate.  What  he  accomplished  without 
it  is  sufficient,  not  perhaps  to  satisfy  our  importunate  thirst, 
but  sufficient  for  his  own  undying  fame. 

The  fiction  of  this  period,  through  the  character  of  the  work 
of  Scott,  its  greatest  creative  writer,  is  a  part  of  the  story  of  the 
Romantic  triumph.  There  were,  however,  several 
Jane  novelists — mainly  women,  as  it  happens — who  were 

Austen,  not  furtherers  of  the  movement,  but  rather  foils  or 
1176-1817.  reactionaries.  One,  Miss  Burney,  has  been  men- 
tioned before,  since  she  did  her  best  work  in  the  pre- 
ceding generation.  Another  was  Maria  Edgeworth,  whose  close 
delineations  of  Irish  life  and  landlordism,  especially  her  Castle 
Rackrnit  (1800),  together  with  certain  tales  for  children,  had  a 
long-lasting  popularity.  But  the  most  important  was  Jane  Aus- 
ten, the  daughter  of  a  Hampshire  rector,  who  moved  unobtru- 
sively in  the  country  squire  rank  of  English  society,  and,  for  a 
long  time  unknown  to  fame,  wrought  her  observations  into  a 
series  of  delightfully  and  absolutely  realistic  novels  which  will 
bear  comparison  with  those  of  Fielding  or  Thackeray.  She 
began  her  writing  in  her  twenty-first  year,  but  found  no  pub- 
lisher until  1811,  when  she  put  forth  Sense  and  Sensibility,  to  be 
rapidly  followed  by  Pride  and  Prejudice,  Mansfield  Park,  Emma, 
Norihanger  Abbey,  and  Persuasion. 

Miss  Austen's  virtues  are  of  the  least  obvious  kind.  Noth- 
ing is  drawn  on  a  large  or  striking  scale.  The  very  life  she  por- 
trays— often  as  homely  as  that  of  Crabbe's  poems,  in  which  she 
delighted,  always  decidedly  feminine  and  provincially  British — 


SCOTT  201 

is  as  narrow  and  circumscribed  as  can  well  be  imagined.  But 
it  is  life,  and  that  is  the  essential  thing.  By  endless  minute 
touches,  given  almost  wholly  in  the  dramatic  form  of  conver- 
sation at  the  everyday  level,  she  presents  living  characters,  and 
not  merely  photographs  of  external  feature  and  circumstance. 
Moreover,  her  own  sense  of  humor  and  irony  plays  about  her 
creations,  giving  that  impression  of  amused  observation  and 
artistic  detachment  which  marks  great  creators  like  Shake- 
speare, Balzac,  or  Thackeray,  and  which  serves  to  stamp  her 
work  as  human  comedy  of  a  very  high  order. 

In  just  one  particular  did  Miss  Austen's  work  have  any  con- 
nection with  the  Romantic  movement:  she  began  by  satirizing 
that  movement,  and  Northanger  Abbey  is  partly  a  burlesque 
upon  the  fantastic  incredibilities  of  such  tales  as  The  Mysteries 
of  Udolpho.  But  prose  romance,  in  a  new  and  saner  guise 
than  that  of  Mrs.  Radcliffe,  was  to  find  at  last  a  vindicator  in 
one  who  at  the  same  time  did  not  refuse  his  admiration  to  the 
sane  and  wholesome  realism  of  both  Miss  Edgeworth  and 
Miss  Austen. 

Walter  Scott  was  a  native  of  Edinburgh,  and  perhaps  the 
greatest  son  of  that  northern  capital.  His  early  life,  spent  in  wan- 
dering over  the  country  as  a  sportsman,  in  mingling 
„  with  society  of  every  grade,  and  in  indifferent  prepa- 

1771-1832.  rS'tion,  partly  at  the  University  of  Edinburgh,  for  the 
paternal  vocation  of  the  law,  gave  no  special  prom- 
ise of  a  literary  career.  But  he  was  a  voracious  reader,  and  he 
steeped  himself  in  the  romance  of  history  and  Scottish  legend. 
He  revelled,  too,  in  the  new  German  romantic  poetry — itself 
deeply  affected  by  Bishop  Percy's  revival  of  the  English  bal- 
lads— and  some  of  it  he  translated,  notably  Biirger's  Lenore 
under  the  title  of  WilUdm  and  Helen  (1796).  After  forming  a 
secret  partnership  with  the  Ballant}Tie  brothers  in  the  printing 
business,  he  prepared  a  collection  of  the  Minstrelsy  of  the  Scottish 
Border,  which  they  published  in  1802-1803.  Then  he  struck 
into  the  vein  of  original  metrical  romances  which  made  him 


262  EARLY    NINETEENTH    CENTURY 

famous.  The  first  was  the  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel  (1805),  a 
tale  of  the  Border  in  the  sixteenth  century,  for  which  he  em- 
ployed the  metre  of  Coleridfi^e's  unpublished  Christabel,  portions 
of  which  he  had  heard  recited.  Thousands  of  copies  of  the 
poem  were  sold;   everybody  was  soon  familiar  with 

"The  way  was  long,  the  wind  was  cold, 
The  minstrel  was  infirm  and  old," 

and  the  tide  of  public  taste  was  turned  at  once  to  the  new  poetry. 
Naturally  Scott  followed  up  the  demand  which  he  had  created, 
producing  in  the  next  few  years  Marmion  (1808),  The  Lady  of 
the  Lake  (1810),  and  other  metrical  romances,  until  the  rising 
star  of  Byron  began  to  dim  the  light  of  his  own  and  he  turned 
his  efforts  to  prose. 

Nowadays  there  are  those  who  would  almost  deny  to  these 
poems  the  name  of  poetry,  saying  that  their  popularity  and 
influence  are  chiefly  with  a  class  of  readers  who  accept  them  for 
anything  or  everything  but  absolutely  poetic  qualities — that 
what  chiefly  holds  their  attention  is  the  story,  assisted  by  the 
short-line,  marching  measures  which  any  one  can  catch  the 
rhythm  of,  and  which  Scott  had  such  a  ready  knack  of  com- 
posing. But  to  tell  a  story  well  requires  both  imagination  and 
art,  and  when  to  these  are  added  facility  in  metre  and  rhyme, 
we  have  a  number  of  legitimate  poetic  elements;  nor  is  it  certain 
that  we  always  think  of  more  than  these  when  we  praise  great 
narrative  poems,  whether  of  Chaucer  or  Dryden.  Doubtless 
Scott  had  little  of  the  divine  afflatus,  the  passion  and  vision  of 
the  anointed  poet;  nevertheless,  our  definition  of  poetry  must 
be  kept  broad  enough  to  include  such  things  as  the  inspiring, 
even  though  declamatory,  "Boat  Song,"  the  tender  "Ave 
Maria,"  and  the  stirring  "Battle  of  Beal'  an  Duine"  in  the 
Lady  of  the  Lake,  or  the  majestic  narrative  of  Flodden  Field 
with  which  Marmion  closes.  Scott  was  not  Coleridge;  but 
there  is  an  order  of  ballad  poetry  that  grips  the  senses  as  well  as 
one  that  awes  the  soul. 


SCOTT 


263 


It  was  in  1814  that  Scott,  who  had  meanwhile  settled  him- 
self in  the  estate  of  Abbotsford  on  the  Tweed,  near  the  ancient 
ruin  of  Melrose  Abbey,  published,  anonymously,  his  first  prose 
romance,  or  novel,  Waverley.  Though  the  authorshij)  was 
quite  unsuspected,  the  success  of  the  venture  was  as  widespread 
and  remarkable  as  his  former  success  in  verse,  and  he  thence- 
forth continued  to  produce  stories  "by  the  author  of  Waverley," 
often  at  the  rate  of  two  in  one  year,  until  in  fourteen  years  he 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT'S  STUDY   AT   AUBOTSFORD. 


had  published  twenty-three  long  novels,  besides  some  shorter 
tales.  He  kept  his  literary  secret  almost  to  the  end,  and  we 
have  presented  to  us  the  unusual  spectacle  of  a  famous  man 
suddenly  withdrawing  behind  a  veil  of  anonymity  to  enjoy  from 
that  seclusion  a  second  and  different  fame.  He  attained  also  to 
other  public  eminence.  As  a  reward  for  his  staunch  Toryism  he 
was  the  first  baronet  whom  George  IV.  created  on  his  succes- 


264  EARLY   NINETEENTH   CENTURY 

sion  to  the  throne.  He  might  well  have  enjoyed  yet  many  years 
of  happiness  in  spite  of  the  tremendous  strain  of  work  which  he 
had  persisted  in  inflicting  upon  himself.  But  his  extravagant 
passion  for  land-owning  and  castle-building,  and  the  failure 
of  his  publishing  partners,  left  him  suddenly  bankrupt  at  the 
age  of  fifty-five;  thenceforward  there  was  nothing  for  him 
but  a  heroic  continuance  of  his  literary  labors  to  save  his  credit 
and  name.  This  he  succeeded  in  doing,  but  in  six  years  more, 
a  few  months  after  the  death  of  Goethe,  utterly  worn  out,  he 
died;  and  ]\Iacaulay,  the  young  member  of  Parliament,  re- 
marked parenthetically  in  a  letter  to  his  sister,  "Poor  Scott  is 
gone;  and  I  cannot  be  sorry  for  it." 

Scott's  novels  might  be  classified  in  several  ways — into 
those,  like  Ivanhoe  and  Quentin  Durward,  that  are  the  especial 
Creator  of  delight  of  youthful  readers,  and  those,  like  Old 
the  Ilistor-  Moiiality,  Guy  Mannering,  and  The  Heart  of 
ical  Novel.  Midlothian,  that  win  the  heartier  approval  of  the 
older  and  more  critical;  or  into  those  that  represent  historical 
scenes  and  events,  like  the  first  three  just  named,  and  those  that 
picture  life  and  manners  with  more  imaginative  freedom ;  or  again 
into  those  whose  scenes  are  laid  outside  of  Scotland,  as  Ivanhoe, 
Kenilworth,  and  Woodstock  in  England,  Quentin  Durward  on 
the  continent,  and  The  Talisman  in  Palestine — a  class,  Ruskin 
holds,  "continually  weak  in  fancy  and  false  in  prejudice" — 
and  those  "literally  Scotch  novels"  which  the  same  worshipper 
of  Scott  regards  as  faultless,  Waverley,  Guy  Mannering,  The 
Antiquary,  Old  Mortality,  The  Heart  of  Midlothian.  But 
classification  matters  little.  It  is  more  to  the  purpose  to  explain 
why  they  should  be  given  the  name  of  novels  at  all.  The  term, 
indeed,  is  not  quite  accurate;  "historical  novels,"  though  not 
all-inclusive,  would  be  better.  For  Scott  is  virtually  the  creator 
of  historical  fiction.  There  had  been  histories,  romances,  and 
novels.  What  Scott  did  was  to  make  these  three  meet  on  the 
common  ground  of  romance.  He  made  no  pretense  to  entire 
historical  truth  nor  to  minute  antiquarian  accuracy.     But  by 


SCOTT  265 

keeping  within  historical  probabiHty  he  avoided  the  ridiculous 
extravagances  of  the  pure  romancers,  finding  still,  in  the  remote 
and  the  past,  and  through  cunningly  invented  plots,  the  atmos- 
phere and  glamour  of  romance.  Then  by  adopting  real  scenes 
as  his  backgrounds,  especially  that  natural  scenery  which  does 
not  change,  and  which  can  therefore  always  be  copied  accurately, 
he  produced  the  illusion  of  reality.  Finally,  through  the  em- 
ployment of  real  personages,  or  through  created  characters  acting 
for  the  most  part  from  normal  motives  and  impulses,  he  secured 
also  the  human  interest  which  gave  to  the  realists,  the  writers  of 
the  novel  proper,  their  peculiar  power. 

It  is  a  great  accomplishment,  and  only  two  faults  of  conse- 
quence can  be  cited  in  diminution  of  it.  Scott's  characters,  espe- 
cially  his  women,  are  not  remarkable  for  accurate  or  subtle  draw- 
ing, and  his  style  is  loose.  It  was  to  be  expected,  perhaps,  in 
composite  work  like  his,  with  its  fundamentally  romantic  aim, 
that  certain  characters  should  be  merely  conventional,  and  that 
others  should  be  romantically  overdrawn  and  ideal.  Yet  not  a 
few  escape  these  strictures.  Dandie  Dinmont,  for  instance,  the 
Border  yeoman  of  Guy  Mannering,  Dominie  Sampson,  the 
eccentric  schoolmaster,  even  the  mad  gipsy,  Meg  Merrilies, 
perhaps  even  the  proud  Highland  chief  in  Waverley,  Fergus 
Maclvor,  with  his  sister  Flora,  have  genuine  lifelikeness.  Assur- 
edly, too,  Jeanie  Deans,  the  dairy-woman  of  The  Heart  of  Mid- 
lothian, is,  in  her  own  rank,  as  admirable  a  character  as  any  of 
Thackeray's,  for  there  are  times  when  simplicity  counts  for 
more  than  subtlety,  and  the  master  of  broad  strokes  secures  the 
strongest  effect.  Of  Scotch  character,  at  least  in  the  humbler 
walks  of  life,  both  in  its  humorous  and  pathetic  aspects,  Scott 
was  a  most  competent  delineator.  Again,  if  the  style  of  his  head- 
long composition  does  not  measure  up  to  the  standards  set  by 
close  criticism,  we  remember  the  purpose  it  was  meant  to  serve. 
It  has  those  things  which  are  all-important  in  narrative — life, 
movement,  and  graphic  power — and  it  might  have  lost  some- 
thing of  these  in  a  search  for  finer  qualities. 


266  EARLY    NINETEENTH   CENTUEY 

In  fact,  the  large  scale  on  which  Scott  works  is  one  of  the 
most  impressive  things  about  him — a  scale  so  large  that  it  would 
be  hopeless  to  attempt,  by  any  citations,  to  illustrate  his  powers. 
The  novels  must  be  read  in  their  entirety  if  one  would  gain  any 
conception  of  their  great  qualities — the  seldom  flagging  ardor 
of  creation,  the  endlessly  diverting  panorama  of  color  and  action, 
the  gorgeous  rehabilitation  of  the  scenes  of  the  past.  So  im- 
pressive arc  they  that  their  influence  has  been  communicated 
to  history  itself,  and  nearly  all  historical  writing  since  Scott's 
time  has  borne  the  signet  of  Waverley.  Upon  life,  too,  have 
the  novels  left  their  mark,  seeing  that  Scott  put  into  his  works, 
objective  though  they  are,  his  own  attributes — his  courage,  his 
loyalty,  his  chivalrous  sense  of  honor,  his  overflowing  good  cheer. 
Admiration  of  chivalry  and  feudalism  has  in  it  at  least  this  much 
of  good  for  an  uncompromisingly  practical  and  democratic  age. 
For  while  the  romantic  spirit  has  often  seemed  to  send  its 
disciples  on  far  and  fruitless  quests,  it  has  seldom  failed, 
by  impulsively  laying  bare  their  inmost  selves,  to  bring  them 
nearer  to  us  as  personalities  than  the  votaries  of  a  colder,  clas- 
sical art  could  hope  to  get.  We  may  or  may  not  praise  Scott, 
Tennyson,  Ruskin,  Morris,  Stevenson,  as  impeccable  artists;  we 
must  recognize  that  their  nobility  of  character,  and  their  ideals, 
as  revealed  in  their  creations,  are  among  the  strongest  sources 
of  inspiration  to  the  race. 


CHAPTER  XVII 

EARLY  NINETEENTH  CENTURY — THE  NEW  PROSE 

1800-1840 

THE  REVIEWEBS       LAMS       DE  QCTINCEY       LANDOK       MACAULAY 

As  if  by  an  impulse  from  the  very  setting  forward  of  the 
calendar,  the  nineteenth  century  brought  a  change  of  front  all 
along  the  line,  manifest  even  in  the  less  creative  forms 
of  prose.  Not  that  there  was  great  abruptness  in  the  change: 
Burke  makes  easy  the  transition  from  Johnson,  Goldsmith,  and 
Gibbon,  to  Lamb,  De  Quincey,  and  Macaulay.  But  the  eight- 
eenth century,  with  all  its  array  of  philosophy,  history,  and 
criticism,  had  nothing  just  like  the  multi-colored  miscellaneous 
prose — extending  from  philosophy  and  history  to  the  ebullient 
expression  of  mere  personal  opinion  and  fancy — of  the  nine- 
teenth. To  fix  upon  any  definite  character  in  this  new  prose 
is  impossible,  for  the  very  essence  of  its  newness  is  to  be  found 
in  its  flexibility  and  variety — its  resumption  of  all  the  virtues 
it  had  at  different  times  possessed  and  their  free  combination 
and  extension.  Modern  orderly  prose  began,  we  have  seen, 
with  Cowley  and  Dryden,  and  continued,  with  here  and  there 
added  grace  or  stateliness,  through  the  eighteenth  century. 
The  new  prose  remains  for  the  most  part  orderly,  always  an 
easy  vehicle  for  immediate  communication,  but  at  the  same 
time  it  resumes,  at  pleasure  or  need,  the  passion,  the  rhythm, 
the  rhetoric,  even  the  crotchets  and  conceits,  of  its  palmiest 
Elizabethan  or  Caroline  days.  And  so  we  find  in  one  WTiter  the 
clearest  of  straightforward  utterance,  in  another  a  classical  finish 
and  repose,  in  another  romantic  flights  of  imagination  and  rhet- 
oric, and  in  yet  another  the  wildest  play  of  fantasy  and  whim. 

A  not  very  promising  beginning  of  this  is  to  be  seen  perhaps 
in  the  founding  in  1802,  by  the  Whigs  Francis  Jeffrey  and  Sydney 
Smith,  of  the  Edinburgh  Review,  one  of  the  earliest  as  it  is  now 

287 


268  EARLY    NINETEEVTH    CENTURY 

the  oldest  of  lucxlern  reviews,  and  a  forerunner  of  the  pop- 
ular   present-day    periodicals.      It    was    followed    after  seven 

years  by  a  Tory  opponent,  the  Quarterly,  and  in 
„    .  1817  by  Blaclcwoofr.f  Manazine,  also  Tory,  with  which 

John  Wilson  ("Christopher  North")  and  Lockhart, 
the  son-in-law  and  biographer  of  Scott,  became  connected.  The 
reviews  were  meant  to  serve  literature,  and  incidentally  politics. 
Their  attitude  toward  the  former  was  a  combination  of  conserva- 
tism in  standards  and  opinions  with  the  most  radical  freedom  of 
expression.  They  (tultivated  a  "slashing"  style  of  criticism, 
aufl  the  special  objects  of  their  attacks  were  the  rising  Romantic 
and  "Cockney"  poets.  It  will  be  remembered  how  they  ran 
afoul  of  Byron  and  Keats;  and  it  was  Jeffrey  who  made  the 
famous  declaration  about  Wordsworth's  ExcAirsion, — "This 
will  never  do  !"  They  assisted,  in  time,  in  the  development 
of  some  excellent  writers  after  their  conservative  standards, 
notably  Macaulay.  But  enduring  literature  was  rather  better 
served  by  another  journal,  which  was  miscellaneous  in  character 
and  more  liberal  in  policy — the  brilliant  but  short-lived  London 
Magazine  (1820-1825),  which  had  the  good  fortune  to  foster 
the  genius  of  both  Lamb  and  De  Quincey.  Of  these  writers 
in  particular  there  is  much  more  to  say.  But  mention  should 
be  made  in  passing  of  at  least  two  other  active  journalists  of  the 
time,  Leigh  Hunt  (1784-1859),  the  friend  of  Keats,  a  poet  as 
well  as  a  delightful  critic  and  essayist,  and  W^illiam  Hazlitt 
(1778-1830),  a  still  more  admirable  critic,  both  of  whom  con- 
tributed enormously  toward  fortifying  the  romanticists  im- 
pregnably  in  their  position.*    The  prose  of  Southey  has  been 

•Ctonslder  the  significance  of  these  words  from  HazUtt's  Lectures  on  the 
English  Poets: 

"Poetry  is  in  all  its  shapes  the  language  of  the  imagination  and  the 
passions,  of  fancy  and  will.  Nothing,  therefore,  can  be  more  absurd  than  the 
outcry  which  has  been  sometimes  ra'sed  by  frigid  and  pedantic  critics  for 
reducing  the  language  of  poetry  to  the  standard  of  common  sense  and  reason. 
.  .  ,  Let  who  will  strip  nature  of  the  colors  and  the  shapes  of  fancy,  the 
poet  is  bound  not  to  do  so;  the  impressions  of  common  sense  and  strong 
imagination,  that  is,  of  passion  and  indilTerence,  cannot  be  the  same,  and  they 
must  have  a  separate  language  to  do  justice  to  either." 


LAilB 


269 


spoken  of  elsewhere,  and  likewise  that  of  Coleridge  and  Words- 
worth, all  of  which  takes  place  in  the  very  large  aggregate  of  the 
period.  Even  Scott  did  good  miscellaneous  work,  and  was  one 
of  the  earliest  contributors  to  the  Edinburgh  Review. 

Of  all  the  group  the  one  whose  work  seems  most  secure 
against  the  ravages  of  time  strayed  into  his  heritage  by  what 
looks    like    only  a 


happy  chance. 


Charles 
Lamb, 

1775-1834.  Charles  Lamb,  the 
son  of  a  lawyer's 
clerk,  a  Blue  Coat  boy  with 
Coleridge  at  Christ's  Hospital, 
and  to  the  end  of  his  days  a 
most  loyal  Londoner,  has  been 
the  object  of  more  mingled 
pity,  love,  and  praise,  than 
often  falls  to  one  human  be- 
ing. He  saw  his  mother 
stabbed  to  death  by  his  sister 
Mary  in  a  fit  of  insanity,  and 
he  consciously  lived  all  his  life 
under  a  threatening  cloud  of 
the  same  malady,  at  the  same 
time  unselfishly  devoting  him- 
self to  the  care  of  ^lary,  who 
outlived  him.  Until  he  was  fifty 
years  of  age  he  was  an  account- 
ant, first  at  the  South  Sea  House  and  then  with  the  East  India 
Company,  spending  his  mornings,  as  he  quaintly  expressed  it, 
driving  his  quill  along  "the  cart-rucks  of  figures  and  ciphers," 
and  his  leisure  hours  lounging  about  the  bookstalls  and  print- 
shops  or  at  home  reading  with  Mary  his  beloved  old  Folios, 
and  then  writing  with  the  "enfranchised  quill  that  frisks  and 
curvets  so  at  ease  over  the  flowery  carpet -ground  of  a  midnight 
dissertation."     In  this  way  he  produced   much    literary  work 


GRAVE   OF  CHARLES   AXD 

MARY  r.AJvrB. 


270  EARLY    NINETEENTH   CENTURY 

of  varying  value, — a  youthful  romance,  several  plays,  poems,* 
epigrams,  ncwsjiaper  trifles,  and  the  like.  Of  this  miscel- 
laneous work,  the  best  known  is  the  Tales  from  Shakespeare 
(1807),  which  he  prepared  with  the  assistance  of  liis  sister, 
and  the  best  Is  his  Specimens  of  the  English  Dramatic  Poets 
(1808),  specimens  selected  with  rare  judgment  and  annotated 
in  a  s}Tnpathetic  and  luminous  manner.  But  if  Lamb  had 
died  at  forty-five,  he  would  be  merely  one  of  that  innumerable 
army  of  hack-writers  whose  names  are  little  known  outside  of 
literary  histories.  In  1820  the  newly  founded  London  Magazine 
asked  him  for  a  contribution,  and  he  wrote  his  Recollections  of 
the  South  Sea  House,  the  first  of  those  random  essays,  just  as 
many  as  there  are  weeks  in  a  year,  which  we  know  now  as  the 
Essays  of  Elia  (1823;  second  series,  1833).  Upon  these  rests 
his  undiminishing  fame. 

It  is  the  personality  of  I>arab  that  gives  them  their  richest 
flavor.  The  essays  are  largely  the  confessions  and  con- 
fidences of  an  ego,  but  of  the  most  innocently  whim- 
„,.  „  '  sical  and  altogether  delightful  ego  that  ever  took 
the  w^orld  into  his  confidence.  "I  am  in  love  with 
this  green  earth,"  he  exclaims;  "sun,  and  sky,  and  breeze,  and 
solitary  walks,  and  summer  holidays,  and  the  greenness  of 
fields,  and  the  delicious  juices  of  meats  and  fishes,  and  society, 
and  the  cheerful  glass,  and  candle-light,  and  fireside  conversa- 
tions, and  innocent  vanities,  and  jests,  and  irony  itself — do 
these  things  go  out  with  life?"  One  cannot  resist  the  infection 
of  a  spirit  that  looks  out  upon  life  in  this  wise,  childlike  way, — 
for-  there  is  wisdom,  in  abundance,  as  well  as  innocence  and 
whim.  We  call  Lamb  quaint;  and  it  is  indeed  odd  to  find 
this  sort  of  thing  between  the  covers  of  a  book.  His  favorite 
reading  was  in  the  "quaint"  Caroline  writers  of  a  century  and 
a  half  before,  especially  Thomas  Fuller;  and. he  sows  his  own 
pages  as  freely  as  they  with  conceits,  pedantries,  jests,  ironies, 

♦  Among  the  poems  written  by  men  who  would  not  have  called  themaelYes 
poets,  Lamb's  The  Old  Familiar  Faces  must  be  given  very  high  rank. 


LAMB  271 

and  puns.  In  one  mood  he  gives  us  a  merry  medley  upon  All 
Fool's  Day  or  a  mock-learned  Dissertation  upon  Roast  Pig,  in 
another  a  delightful  bit  of  portraiture  and  reminiscence  like  Old 
China,  in  another  such  a  beautiful  improvisation  as  The  Child 
Angel  or  such  a  profoundly  pathetic  one  as  Dream-Children; 
a  Reverie.  From  one  point  of  view,  it  all  seems  like  the  very 
sublimation  of  gossip,  small  talk  elevated  to  the  dignity  of 
literature;  but  from  another  it  is  seen  to  be  really  fine  thoughts, 
in  negligee, — a  shrewd  philosophy  wearing  an  antic  face.  Take, 
for  a  single  instance,  liis  odd  division  of  the  human  species  into 
"the  men  who  borrow  and  the  men  who  lend,"  beneath  which 
there  is  assuredly  a  very  subtle  and  grave  truth. 

But  Lamb  must  be  read  with  large  allowances.  A  pro- 
fessed jester  and  a  frank  egoist,  a  man  of  "imperfect  sympa- 
thies," loving  Quaker  ways,  for  instance,  but  scarcely  Quakers, 
vidiculing  "dead  nature"  but  loitering  for  hours  in  old-fashioned 
gardens,  laughing  at  Scotchmen,  prejudiced  against  Jews — 
how,  it  may  well  be  asked,  is  one  to  take  him  ?  We  must  read 
always  by  a  kind  of  divination,  both  to  know  what  he  means 
and  whether  he  means  it.  If  the  sources  of  his  charm  were 
not  so  endless,  one  would  be  tempted  to  say  they  lie  chiefly  in 
his  feminine  sensitiveness  to  elusive  distinctions  and  the  ever 
surprising  novelty  of  his  point  of  view.  Note  his  definition 
of  the  Poor  Relation — "the  most  irrelevant  thing  in  nature," 
"an  odious  approximation,"  whose  rap  at  your  door  is  "between 
familiarity  and  respect."  Or  read  his  description  of  himself 
when  his  employers  pensioned  him  and  the  long  drudgery  of 
the  counting-house  became  a  thing  of  the  past: 

"For  the  first  day  or  two  I  felt  stunned — overwhelmed.  I  could 
only  apprehend  my  felicity;  I  was  too  confused  to  taste  it  sincerely. 
I  wandered  about,  thinldng  I  was  happy,  and  knowing  that  I  was 
not.  I  was  in  the  condition  of  a  prisoner  in  the  old  Bastile,  suddenly 
let  loose  after  a  forty  yc»s'  confinement.  I  could  scarce  trust  mysdf 
with  myself.  It  was  line  passing  out  of  Time  into  Eternity — for  it 
is  a  sort  of  Eternity  fo^  man  to  have  his  Time  all  to  himself.     It 


272  EARLY    NINETEENTH   CENTURY 

seemed  to  me  that  I  had  inure  time  on  my  hands  than  I  could  ever 
manage.  From  a  poor  man,  poor  in  Time,  I  was  suddenly  lifted  up 
into  a  vast  revenue;  I  could  see  no  end  of  my  possessions:  I  wanted 
some  steward,  or  judicious  bailiff,  to  manage  my  estates  in  Time  for 

me 

"I  am  no  longer  *  *  *  *^  clerk  to  the  Firm  of,  &c.  I  am 
Retired  liCisure.  I  am  to  be  met  with  in  trim  gardens.  I  am  already 
come  to  be  known  by  my  vacant  face  and  careless  gesture,  perambu- 
lating at  no  fixed  pace,  nor  with  any  settled  purpose.  I  walk  about; 
not  to  and  from.  They  tell  me,  a  certain  cvm  dignitate  air,  that  has 
been  buried  so  long  with  my  other  good  parts,  has  begun  to  shoot 
forth  in  my  person.  I  grow  into  gentility  perceptibly.  When  I  take 
up  a  newspaper,  it  is  to  read  the  state  of  the  opera.  Ojms  operatum 
est.  I  have  done  all  that  I  came  into  this  world  to  do,  I  have 
worked  task-work,  and  have  the  rest  of  the  day  to  myself." — The 
Superannuated  Man. 

Did  any  man  ever  before  get  just  this  angle  of  vision?  And 
quite  as  nondescript  as  the  substance  is  the  style — a  thing  of 
no  law — incoherent,  iterative,  stuttering,  formless.  Yet  it  is 
a  style  of  infinite  modulation,  and  it  never  fails  to  accord  with 
either  the  wildest  mirth  or  the  most  moving  pathos.  Its  quality 
is  pre-eminently  the  quality  that  in  music  we  call  "expression," 
which  comes  from  the  performer  alone — the  instrument  will 
not  yield  it  to  another's  touch.  Lamb,  in  short,  like  the  patient 
whom  he  describes  as  lording  it  on  a  sick-bed,  lords  it  incon- 
testably  in  his  own  realm:  "Within  the  four  curtains  he  is 
absolute." 

The  name  of  Thomas  de  Quincey  takes  us  northward 
again  to  the  associations  of    the  Lake  country  and  Scotland. 

He  was  born  in  Manchester,  lost  his  father  at  seven, 
Thomas  de  and  at  seventeen  ran  away  from  the  Manchester 
Quincey,  (Grammar  School  (where  he  had  proved  himself  a 
1785-1859.    i,ettej.  "Grecian"  than  the  headmaster)  to  seek  out 

the  author  of  the  Lyrical  Ballads.  Such,  at  any  rate, 
was  iiis  first  intention.  What  he  actually  did  was  to  take  a 
solitary  tramp  of  several  months  through  the  romantic  regions 
of  Wales.    Then  he  drifted  to  London  and  passed  a  winter  of 


DE  QUINCEY  273 

obscurity  and  semi-starvation  in  the  streets  of  that  city.  He 
was  finally  traced  by  his  friends  and  sent  to  Oxford,  but  he  took 
no  degree  there,  characteristically  disappearing  at  examination 
time.  We  scarcely  need  his  assurance  that  he  was  of  a  sensitive, 
dreamy  disposition,  and  much  given  to  solitary  study  and  medi- 
tation. He  declared  that  he  had  passed  more  of  his  life  in 
absolute  solitude,  for  intellectual  purposes,  than  any  person  he 
had  ever  heard  of.  He  thus  amassed  an  immense  store  of 
knowledge,  particularly  in  history,  philosophy,  and  literature. 
In  this  respect,  and  especially  in  his  familiarity  with  German 
learning,  he  was  like  Coleridge.  He  was  like  him  also  in  another 
never-to-be-forgotten  though  less  important  fact,  that  he  fell  a 
victim  to  opium.  His  introduction  to  the  drug  took  place  at 
Oxford,  but  his  slavery  to  it  did  not  begin  till  he  was  twenty- 
eight,  after  his  character  and  habits  were  practically  determined. 
For  some  time  after  leaving  Oxford  he  oscillated  between 
London,  with  Coleridge  and  Lamb  as  the  attractions,  and  Gras- 
mere,  in  the  neighborhood  of  Wordsworth  and  Suuthey,  settling 
finally  at  Grasmere.  In  1816  he  married.  In  1821  he  was 
urged  to  write  the  story  of  his  life  for  the  London  Magazine.  The 
resulting  Confessioris  of  an  English  Ojyium-Eater  was  another  of 
those  strikingly  original  things  with  which  that  favored  generation 
was  almost  yearly  startled,  and  De  Quincey,  then  in  middle 
life,  became  settled  in  a  literary  career.  For  nearly  forty  years 
more  he  pursued  his  strange  way,  living  sometimes  wath,  some- 
times apart  from,  his  family,  mostly  at  Edinburgh,  whither  he 
was  drawn  by  Wilson,  the  editor  of  Blackwood's  and  his  life- 
long friend,  reading,  writing,  and  struggling  with  the  terrible 
enemy  which  he  never  conquered. 

The  fourteen  volumes  of  his  collected  works  are  of  a  most 
miscellaneous  character,  "Judas  Iscariot,"  "Pagan  Oracles," 
"Roman  Meals,"  "Rhetoric,"  "Milton,"  "Dr,  Parr,"  "Political 
Economy,"  "The  Last  Days  of  Kant,"  are  examples  of  his 
subjects.  There  is  scarcely  a  large,  coherent  treatise  among 
them,  though  on  the  other  hand  they  are  not  so  disjointed  as 


274'  EARLY   NINETEENTH   CENTURY 

is  much  of  Coleridge's  prose.  We  need  not  stay  Upon  the  his- 
torical and  biographical  sketches,  which,  considered  merely 
as  such,  have  all  been  superseded.  The  speculative  and  critical 
papers  are  of  more  permanent  value.  De  Quincey's  mind  was 
keenly  analytical,  lie  was  alive  to  the  subtlest  distinctions  of 
thought  and  feeling.  No  one  has  been  quicker  than  he  to  detect 
a  fallacy  or  a  quil)l)le.  His  own  diction  is  probably  more  studi- 
ously precise,  exemf)lifying  more  delicate  discriminations,  than 
that  of  any  other  English  writer.  It  follows  that  whenever  he 
has  anything  to  say  upon  such  matters  as  rhetoric  or  style,  or 
when  he  selects  a  higher  theme  and  writes  On  Wordsworth's 
Poetry  or  On  the  Knocking  at  the  Gate  in  Macbeth,  he  is  well 
worth  listening  to.  Better  still,  one  likes  to  listen  to  him.  For 
his  intellectual  acumen  is  united  to  a  sensibility  that  human- 
izes whatever  he  touches.  It  is  human  sympathy,  for  in- 
stance, even  more  than  historical  insight  that  makes  his  Joan 
of  Arc  such  a  clairvoyant  exposition  of  character.  His  work  in 
this  kind  might  have  been  very  great  indeed,  had  he  only  learned 
to  overcome  several  vexatious  defects.  He  is  hampered  both 
by  his  fondness  for  hair-splitting,  which  often  stops  the  progress 
of  his  thought,  and  by  the  weight  of  his  learning,  which  swells 
his  text  with  irrelevant  details,  and  which  overflows  into  digres- 
sions, parentheses,  and  footnotes.  His  unworldliness,  too, 
often  betrayed  him  into  strange  caprices,  leading  him  to  intrude 
his  personality  upon  the  reader  at  times  when  the  intrusion  is 
very  trying  to  the  patience.  That  Lamb  could  always  do  this 
sort  of  thing  without  giving  offence,  and  De  Quincey  not  always, 
is  due  in  part,  of  course,  to  the  difference  in  their  personalities, 
but  in  part  also  to  Lamb's  greater  savoir  faire. 

De  Quincey's  greatest  claim  to  consideration  lies  in  those 
more  purely  imaginative  portions  of  his  work  which  may  be 
fittingly  described  as  extravaganzas.  Some,  like  his  Murder 
(Umsidered  as  On^  of  the  Fine  Arts,  are  chiefly  playful  or  humor- 
ous, and  De  Quincey  has  often  been  extolled  as  a  humoris^. 
But  here  again  his  eccentricities  stand  in  his  way.     There  are 


DE   QUINCEY  275 

those  who  find  him  only  pedantic  and  absurd.  His  angle  of 
vision  is  often  unique,  and  indulgent  readers  may  be  highly 
amused;  still,  he  is  never  so  sure  of  all  suffrages  as  Lamb. 
But  when  he  enters  his  own  region  of  imaginative  and  impas- 
sioned rhetoric,  of  "prose-poetry,"  he  is  supreme.  This  he 
does  at  intervals  in  his  Confessions,  sometimes  in  The  Spanish 
Military  Nun,  Joan  of  Arc,  and  The  Revolt  of  the  Tartars  (almost 
purely  a  romance),  but  most  deliberately  and  effectively  in 
certain  of  the  Suspiria  de  Profundis  papers,  such  as  The  Eng- 
lish  Mail  Coach  and  Levana  and  our  Ladies  of  Sorrow. 

"Passion  of  sudden  death!  that  once  in  youth  I  read  and  inter- 
preted by  the  shadows  of  thy  averted  signs !  rapture  of  panic  taking 
the  shape  (wliich  among  tombs  in  churches  I  have  seen)  of  woman 
bursting  her  sepulchral  bonds — of  woman's  Ionic  form  bending 
forward  from  the  ruins  of  her  grave  with  arching  foot,  with  eyes 
upraised,  with  clasped  adoring  hands — waiting,  watching,  trembling, 
praying  for  the  trumpet's  call  to  rise  from  dust  forever!  Ah,  vision 
too  fearful  of  shuddering  humanity  on  the  brink  of  almighty  abysses! 
Vision  that  didst  start  back,  that  didst  reel  away,  like  a  shrivelling 
scroll  from  before  the  wrath  of  iire  racing  on  the  wings  of  the  Avind! 
Epilepsy  so  brief  of  horror,  wherefore  is  it  that  thou  canst  not  die? 
Passing  so  suddenly  into  darkness,  wherefore  is  it  that  still  thou 
sheddest  thy  sad  funeral  blights  upon  the  gorgeous  mosaics  of 
dreams?  Fragment  of  music  too  passionate,  heard  once,  and  heard 
no  more,  what  aileth  thee,  that  thy  deep  rolling  chords  come  up  at 
intervals  through  all  the  worlds  of  sleep,  and,  after  forty  years,  have 
lost  no  element  of  horror?" 

It  is  in  passages  like  this,  the  beginning  of  the  "Dream-Fugue" 
in  the  English  Mail-Loach,  that  we  recognize  De  Quincey's 
surest  hand.  As  Lamb  harked  back  to  the  quaintness  of  Fuller, 
De  Quincey  harked  back  to  the  splendor  and  rhythm  of  Browne. 
He  endeavored  to  put  into  prose  such  harmonies  as  his  other 
favorite,  Milton,  put  into  verse.  He  called  to  his  assistance  a 
vocabulary  of  extraordinary  range  and  picturesqueness,  and 
all  the  resources  of  a  stately  and  ornate  rhetoric — inversion, 
ellipsis,  apostrophe,  tone-quality,  rhythm, — with  the  result  that 
in  his  pages  written  English  has  attained  perhaps  its  farthest 


27ft  EARLY   NINETEENTH   CENTURY 

stage  of  purely  imaginative  eloquence.  Certainly,  in  no  other 
writer  has  prose  reached  so  far  over  the  bounds  of  music,  and 
in  no  other  has  it  given  such  lively  reality  to  the  fleeting  phan- 
tasmagory  of  imagination  and  dreams. 

Walter  Savage  Landor,  whose  reactionary  tendencies  took 
a  very  different  direction,  was  another  strange  product  of  thus 
complex  [)eriod.  He  also  passed  much  of  his  life  in 
Walter  isolation — the  isolation,  in  his  case,  of  intellectual 

Savage  and  social  pride.    "I  strove  with  none,"  he  declared, 

Landor,  "for  none  wa.s  worth  my  strife."  Southey  was  almost 
i77-^-18H4.  j^jg  Qj^jy  ijtgj-ary  friend.  He  was  a  native  of  Shake- 
speare's county,  AVarwick,  and  was  brought  up  in 
considerable  luxury.  His  violent  temper  got  him  constantly 
into  trouble.  He  left  Oxford  as  the  result  of  a  prank  to  which 
he  refused  to  confess;  once,  in  the  heat  of  his  republican  ardor, 
he  rushed  off  to  Spain  to  help  resist  the  aggressions  of  Napoleon; 
in  the  midst  of  social  gayety  at  Bath  he  contracted  a  hasty  and 
unfortunate  marriage;  he  nearly  impoverished  himself  by  the 
purchase  of  an  Abbey  on  the  borders  of  Wales;  and  when  life 
in  England  became  unendurable,  as  it  several  times  did,  he  fled 
to  Italy.  He  died  there,  still  unreconciled  with  his  children, 
but  cared  for  by  Browning,  in  his  ninetieth  year. 

Landor  began  his  writing  with  poetry,  publishing  as  early 
as  1795.  He  was  an  accomplished  Greek  and  Latin  scholar, 
and  his  classical  training  profoundly  influenced  all  his  work, 
giving  it  a  purity,  finish,  and  restraint  in  strange  contrast  to  his 
own  romantic  temperament.  His  long  blank  verse  tale  of  Gebir 
is  compact  of  both  classical  and  romantic  qualities.  It  was  pub- 
lished in  the  same  year  as  the  Lyrical  Ballads,  1798,  but  was  too 
lofty  and  cold  to  win  popular  approval.  His  Helletiics  were 
actually  composed  and  published  in  Latin  (1815)  before  they 
were  reclothed  in  English.  But  of  all  his  poems,  containing 
among  them  literally  scores  of  exquisite  trifles  which  will  not 
suffer  by  comparison  with  Herrick's  Hesperides,  though  of  very 


LANDOK  277 

different  flavor,  almost  the  only  thing  at  all  widely  known  is  the 
little  eight-line  commemoration  of  Rose  Aylvier: 

"Ah  what  avails  the  sceptred  race, 
Ah  what  the  form  divine! 
What  every  virtue,  every  grace! 
Rose  Aylmer,  all  were  thine. 

"  Rose  Aylmer,  whom  these  wakeful  eyes 
May  weep,  but  never  see, 
A  night  of  memories  and  of  siglis 
I  consecrate  to  thee." 

His  significant  contribution  to  literature  began  in  later  life, 
when  in  his  retirement  at  Plorence  he  composed  his  long  prose 
series  of  Imaginary  Conversations  (1824-1829).  In  these,  great 
men  and  women  of  ancient  or  modern  times  are  represented  as 
conversing  upon  some  theme  of  presumably  contemporaneous 
interest.  Hannibal,  for  instance,  exchanges  words  of  admira- 
tion and  pity  with  his  djing  enemy  Marcellus;  Peter  the  Great 
charges  his  son,  the  Prince  Alexis,  with  treason ;  Queen  Elizabeth 
talks  with  her  minister.  Lord  Burleigh,  about  pensioning  Erl- 
mund  Spenser;  Addison  rebukes  Steele  for  running  into  debt; 
Southey  and  Landor  themselves  hold  a  stately  conference  over 
Milton's  poetry  and  kindred  matters.  There  is  little  attempt  to 
re-tell  history — almost  everything  but  the  characters  and  the 
central  incident  is  invented;  and  the  dialogues  have  little  dra- 
matic value,  since  there  is  no  plot  and  scarcely  any  action. 
Now  and  then  there  is  a  highly  dramatic  situation,  as  in  the 
powerful  Tiberius  and  Vipsania.  But  for  the  most  part  w^e 
read  for  the  weight  of  sententious  utterance,  so  fittingly  put 
into  the  mouths  of  the  wise  and  great,  and  for  the  remarkable 
clarity  and  purity  of  the  style.  Indeed,  Landor,  himself  a 
refined  Epicurean,  is  for  the  literary  epicure.  There  is  no 
violence  or  romantic  excess  in  his  pages.  If  he  never  attempts 
De  Quincey's  flights,  neither  does  he  experience  his  falls.  His 
philosophy  and  criticism  may  be  impaired  by  many  intellectual 
crotchets,  but  his  pages  are  almost  without  aesthetic  blemish. 


278  EARLY   NINETEENTH   CENTURY 

The  virtues  he  sought  and  attained  were  Greek  symmetry  and 
repose,  and  passion  itself  was  kept  subject  to  them. 

Leofric.  O  light,  laughing  simpletonl  ,  But  what  wouldst  thou? 
I  came  not  hither  to  pray ;  and  yet  if  praying  would  satisfy  thee,  or 
remove  the  drought,  I  would  ride  up  straightway  to  Saint  Michael's 
and  pray  until  morning. 

Godiva.  I  would  do  the  same,  O  Leofric!  but  God  hath  turned 
away  his  ear  from  holier  lips  than  mine.  Would  my  own  dear  hus- 
band hear  me,  if  I  implored  him  for  what  is  easier  to  accomplish, — 
what  he  can  do  like  God?  • 

Leofric.     How!     What  is  it? 

Godiva.  I  would  not,  in  the  first  hurry  of  your  wrath,  appeal 
to  you,  my  loving  Lord,  in  behalf  of  these  unhappy  men  who  have 
offended  you. 

Leofric.     Unhappy!     Is  that  all? 

Godiva.  Unhappy  they  must  surely  be,  to  have  offended  you 
so  grievously.  What  a  soft  air  breathes  over  us!  How  quiet  and 
serene  and  still  an  evening!  How  calm  are  the  heavens  and  the 
earth! — Shall  none  enjoy  them;  not  even  we,  my  Leofric?  The 
sun  is  ready  to  set ;  let  it  never  set,  O  Leofric,  on  your  anger.  These 
are  not  my  words;  they  are  better  than  mine.  Should  they  lose 
their  virtue  from  my  unworthiness  in  uttering  them? 

Landor  continued  to  write  down  to  the  very  last  year  of 
his  vigorous  old  age,  and  after  fully  two  generations  had  fol- 
lowed him  on  the  pathway  to  fame.  Two  other  of  his  books 
should  be  mentioned,  Pericles  and  Aspasia  (1836)  and  The 
Pentameron  (1837).  The  first  is  in  the  form  of  letters,  and 
attempts  to  reconstruct  for  the  imagination  the  social  life  of 
Athens  in  the  brilliant  age  of  Pericles.  Both  are  worthy  of  the 
author  of  the  Conversations,  and  with  them  make  a  body  of 
prose  which  will  always  be  cherished  by  a  select,  though  un- 
doubtedly limited,  number  of  readers. 

Thomas  Babington  Macaulay,  whose  birth  fell  by  a  very 
narrow  margin  within  the  eighteenth  century,  was  half  a  genera- 
tion younger  than  the  men  who  have  just  been  treated,  and 
he  stands,  indeed,  with  one  foot  entirely  in  the  succeeding 
Victorian  age,  where  we  shall  have  to  treat  at  least  one  man 


MACAULAY  279 

(Carlyle)  older  than  he.  But  Macaulay  was  as  precocious  in 
his  development  as  these  men  were  tardy;  his  work  was  attract- 
ing attention  in  the  same  decade  when  Lamb,  De 
Thomas  Quincey,  and  Landor  were  winning  their  laurels: 
,,  ,  and  he  was  so  clearly  a  creation  and  exponent  of 
1800-1839  ^^6  new  journalism^  that  his  place  is  manifestly 
here.  He  was  born  to  a  competence  which  through 
family  misfortunes  he  failed  to  enjoy  beyond  the  period  of  his 
education.  When  his  father's  business  interests  began  to  suffer 
from  too  great  a  devotion  to  the  cause  of  the  abolition  of  the  West 
Indian  slave  trade,  the  young  Cambridge  graduate  went  home 
to  London  unselfishly  to  assume  the  burdens  of  the  family.  This 
was  in  1824.  The  year  before  that  he  had  begun  to  contribute 
to  Knight's  Quarterly  Magazine,  and  the  year  following  he  was 
engaged  by  Jeffrey  to  write  for  the  great  Edinburgh.  In  1825,  be- 
fore he  was  yet  twenty-five  years  of  age,  appeared  the  well-known 
essay  on  Milton,  a  work  which,  whatever  be  its  rhetorical  and 
temperamental  defects,  is  almost  as  mature  in  grasp  as  it  is  bril- 
liant in  execution.  It  met  with  wide  favor,  and  Macaulay,  from 
supporting  a  Whig  Review,  found  the  road  easy  to  the  support 
of  the  Whig  party  in  practical  politics.  He  was  called  to  the 
Bar  in  1826  and  entered  the  House  of  Commons  in  1830,  where 
his  speech  on  the  Reform  Bill  marked  him  as  an  orator  of  the 
highest  ability.  The  remainder  of  his  life  was  spent  in  almost 
continuous  devotion  to  public  service.  Four  years  in  India 
as  legal  adviser  to  the  Supreme  Council  repaired  his  fortunes. 
He  was  twice  again  in  Parliament  and  once  in  the  Cabinet.  He 
was  honored  with  the  rank  of  baron  in  1857,  and  upon  his  death, 
two  years  later,  was  interred  in  the  Poet's  Corner  in  Westmin- 
ster Abbey. 

That  Macaulay,  through  all  this  public  activity,  should 
have  accomplished  so  much  private  literary  work,  and  of  a  kind 
that  involved  so  much  reading,  is  little  short  of  marvellous. 
The  total  number  of  his  critical  and  historical  Essays  contributed 
to  the  Edinburgh  Review  (first  collected  in  1843)  was  thirty-six, 


280  EARLY   NINETEENTH   CENTURY 

and  each  one  of  them  is  almost  a  treatise  in  itself.  Besides 
other  miscellaneous  work,  there  were  the  speeches,  the  poems — 
Latjs  of  Ancient  Rome  (1842), — and  the  History  of  England 
from  the  Accession  of  James  the  Second  (1848,  1855,  1861),  to 
which  he  gave  the  energies  of  his  later  years.  This  last  was 
planned  on  so  great  a  scale  that  though  at  the  time  of  his  death 
he  had  completed  almost  five  volumes,  he  had  covered  little  more 
than  fifteen  years  of  actual  English  history.  The  poems  are 
few  in  number,  but  much  of  Macaulay's  fame  has,  from  the 
time  of  their  publication,  rested  upon  them.  In  regard  to  them 
it  is  possible  to  raise  the  same  query  as  in  regard  to  Scott's. 
Macaulay's  temperament  was  certainly  still  farther  than  Scott's 
from  the  essentially  poetic,  and  he  was  himself  very  diffident 
about  making  any  poetic  claim.  His  imagination  was  historical, 
or  re-creative  only,  not  creative.  But  this  order  of  imagination 
at  least  he  had,  together  with  a  sense  of  rhythm,  and  these  are 
sufficient  for  the  kind  of  poetry  which  he  essayed —  for  ballads 
like 

"Lars  Porsena  of  Clusium 
By  the  Nine  Gods  he  swore," 
or 

"Now  glory  to  the  Lord  of  Hosts,  from  whom  all  glories  are  I" 

As  between  the  Essays  and  the  History,  the  latter  is  un- 
doubtedly his  greater  work.  Considered  merely  as  history  it 
may  have  faults  of  inaccuracy  and  party  bias,  but  as  a  brilliant 
and  detailed  historical  narrative  it  has  never  been  excelled.  He 
aimed  to  make  history  pictorial,  a  reconstruction'  of  life  that 
should  be  as  interesting  as  romance;  and,  thanks  largely  no 
doubt  to  what  Scott  had  already  done  in  fiction,  he  succeeded. 
He  brought  to  the  work,  moreover,  his  own  special  gifts,  his 
power  of  bringing  instantly  into  one  focus  the  accumulations  of  a 
prodigious  memory,  his  faculty  for  drawing  illuminating  parallels, 
and  the  grasp  of  detail  as  well  as  the  insight  into  men  and 
measures  that  alone  can  reduce  to  order  the  confusion  of  human 
events.    But  the  essays,  which  began  back  in  1825,  illustrate  al- 


■\Val,ti:k  Savaok  Lanook 
Thomas  I>e  Qlincey 


ClIAItLKS   J^A.MII 

Thomas  RAi»iN'f;TON  Macai-i.ay 


MACAT7LAT  281 

most  equally  well  Macaulay's  several  virtues.  The  historical  ones 
are  like  histories  in  miniature,  grouping  large  events  about  a 
central  character,  and  those  on  English  themes  can  almost  be 
put  together  into  a  continuous  history.  They  are  above  all 
clear,  lively,  concrete,  and  substantive.  Every  sentence  says 
something,  and  says  it  so  sharply  and  succinctly  that  tHere  is 
never  a  moment's  doubt  about  the  meaning.  The  briefest 
example  will  suffice  to  illustrate: 

"The  Serjeants  made  proclamation.  Hastings  advanced  to 
the  bar  and  bent  his  knee.  The  culprit  was  indeed  not  unworthy 
of  that  great  presence.  He  had  ruled  an  extensive  and  populous 
country,  had  made  laws  and  treaties,  had  sent  forth  armies,  had  set 
up  and  pulled  down  princes.  And  in  his  high  place  he  had  so  borne 
himself  that  all  had  feared  him,  that  most  had  loved  him,  and  that 
liatred  itself  could  deny  him  no  title  to  glory  except  \artue.  He 
looked  like  a  great  man  and  not  like  a  bad  man.  A  person  small 
and  emaciated,  yet  deriving  dignity  from  a  carriage  which,  while 
it  indicated  deference  to  the  court,  indicated  also  habitual  self-pos- 
session and  self-respect;  a  high  and  intellectual  forehead;  a  brow, 
pensive,  but  not  gloomy;  a  mouth  of  inflexible  decision;  a  face  pale 
and  worn,  but  serene,  on  which  was  written,  as  legibly  as  under  the 
picture  in  the  council-chamber  at  Calcutta,  Mens  aequa  in  arduis; 
such  was  the  aspect  with  which  the  great  Proconsul  presented  him- 
self to  his  judges." — Warren  Hastings. 

Jeffrey  called  it  a  new  style.  It  was  new,  perhaps,  in  its 
vigor  and  dash,  and  in  its  occasional  splashes  of  romantic  color. 
But  in  its  main  features  it  was  conservative — in  its  adherence, 
for  instance,  to  the  standard  vocabulary,  and  its  employment  of 
the  time-honored  rhetorical  devices  of  balance  and  antithesis. 
Indeed,  a  close  examination  will  show  that  INIacaulay  derives 
very  directly  from  Johnson  as  Johnson  is  seen  in  his  later  and 
less  pompous  work,  such  as,  for  instance,  his  life  of  Addison  in 
the  Lives  of  the  Poets.  Even  his  brilliance  is  more  akin  to  the 
splendor  of  Gibbon  and  Burke  than  to  the  gorgeousness  of  De 
Quincey  and  the  later  romanticists.  The  glitter  of  the  style  is 
rather  too  hard  to  be  beautiful,  and  its  movement  is  too  inces- 
santly staccato  to  be  restful,  but  with  its  clearness  and  force  it 


282  EARLY   NINETEENTH   CENTURY 

has  proved  an  almost  perfect  instrument  for  an  ago  of  journalism. 
Macaulay  is  thus  the  true  perpetuator  of  the  traditionary  "mid- 
dle style,"  the  transmitter  to  the  nineteenth  century,  and  so 
on  to  the  twentieth,  of  that  clear,  formal,  dignified,  and  practical 
prose  of  which  Cowley  and  Dryden  first  set  the  manner  in  the 
seventeenth.  He,  of  all  the  writers  of  the  age  in  which  we  have 
considered  him,  is  the  best  link  between  the  past  and  the  present; 
and,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  long  before  his  death  and  De  Quincey's 
and  Landor's,  the  Victorian  age,  with  its  several  groups  of 
writers  scarcely  less  diverse  and  brilliant  than  those  who  weit 
just  before,  had  been  ushered  in. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 


THE  VICTORIAN   AGE — POETRY 
1830-1880 


William  IV 1830-37 

Reform  Bill  passed 1832 

Suppression  t}f  Colonial  Slav- 
ery   1833 

Tractarian  {Oxford,  or  High 

Church)  Movement 1833-41 

New  Poor  Law 1834 

Accession  of  Victoria 1837 

Free  Trade  Agitation 1841 

Repeal  of  the  Corn  Laws  1846 

Chartist  Rising 1848 

Crimean  War 1854 

Indian  Mutiny 1857 

Second  Reform  Bill 1867 

Irish  Land  Bill 1870 

Irish  Land  League 1879 

Fall  of  Conservative  Ministry, 1880 


TENNYSON 
BROWNING 
MKS.  BROWNING 
ARNOLD 
CLOUGH 

( The  Novel, 
Chapter  XIX) 

DICKENS 
THACKERAY 
MISS  BRONTE 
GEORGE    ELIOT 

{Prose,  Chap- 
ter XX) 

CARLYLE 
RUSKIN 
NEWMAN 
ARNOLD 


Heine 

Chopin 

Mendelssohn 

Strauss 

Ranke,  Mommsen 

Auerbaeh 

Lamartlne 

Hugo,  De  Musset 

Balzac,  Dumas 

Gulzot 

De  Tocqueville 

SalnteBeuve 

Renan 

Turgenieff,  Tolstoi 

Emerson 

Poe,  Hawthorne 

Longfellow,  Lowell 


It  is  not  difficult  to  distinguish  the  large  movements  in 
national  life  and  thought  which  determined  the  character  of 
the  nineteenth  century.  They  are,  first,  the  spread  of  democ- 
racy, a  humanitarian  movement,  and  second,  the  growth  of 
the  scientific  spirit.  The  first  is  political  and  social,  the  second 
intellectual  and  social.  The  conservative  reaction,  the  check 
to  the  spread  of  republican  principles  which  followed  the  failure 
of  the  French  Revolution,  was  not  of  long  continuance.  Shortly 
after  the  close  of  the  Napoleonic  Wars  with  the  victory  of 
Waterloo  in  1815,  the  forward  movement  began  to  be  felt  again. 
In  England,  progress  took  the  shape  of  cautious  reform  imstead 
of  violent  revolution.  In  1829  the  Whigs  succeeded  in  securing 
the  admission  of  Roman  Catholics  to  Parliament  and  other 
high  offices.     In  1832  the  Reform  Bill  considerably  extended 

283 


2*4  THE   VICTORIAN    ACE 

the  voting  j)rivilcge  among  the  middle  class.  In  1833  slavery 
in  the  colonics  was  suppressed.  In  1840  the  repeal  of  the  corn 
laws  established  free  trade.  In  1867  a  still  more  sweeping 
reform  hill  was  enacted  into  law.  The  only  disturbances  of 
importance  abroad  were  the  war  in  the  Crimea,  through  which 
England  again  entered  continental  politics,  and  the  Indian 
Mutiny,  which  resulted  in  destroying  the  power  of  the  East 
India  Company.  Both  of  these  took  place  in  the  sixth  decade. 
Meanwhile  national  expansion  continued,  especially  through 
the  attention  paid  to  colpnial  development  in  Canada  and  Aus- 
tralia. In  education  and  science,  progress  was  equally  marked. 
A  system  of  national  education  was  introduced  in  1834;  free 
libraries  were  established  in  1850;  and  in  the  following  year  a 
great  world's  exposition  was  held  at  the  Crystal  Palace.  The 
Liverpool  and  Manchester  Railroad  was  opened  in  1830;  the 
electric  telegraph  came  into  use  in  1837;  and  there  was  a  con- 
current development  of  commerce  by  steam  navigation.  Within 
the  Church  a  counter-tendency  toward  ritualism  was  for  a  while 
apparent,  in  the  so-called  Tractarian,  or  Oxford  Movement, 
which  .strongly  affected  the  Universities;  but  that  too  was  only 
such  a  quickening  of  the  conscience  as  naturally  accompanied 
the  quickening  that  was  going  on  in  every  direction.  Nearly 
all  these  things  touched  literature,  and  are  mirrored  in  one 
way  or  another  in  the  poems  of  Tennyson,  the  novels  of  Dickens 
and  Kingsley,  and  the  essays  of  Carlyle,  Ruskin,  Newman,  and 
Arnold. 

The  year  1832,  the  date  of  the  death  of  Scott,  is  ordinarily 
given  as  marking  the  end  of  the  first  literary  period  of  the  century. 
But  dates  are  seldom  altogether  satisfactory  dividing  lines  in 
literature:  in  this  case,  looking  at  poetry  alone,  we  find  that 
before  1832  there  was  a  brief  interregnum,  not  incomparable 
to  that  which  took  place  more  than  a  century  earlier  between 
the  death  of  Dryden  and  the  appearance  of  Pope.  For  Scott 
wrote  no  poetry  in  his  later  life;  and  when  Byron  died  in  1824 
Keats  and  Shelley  were  both  gone,  Coleridge's  poetic  faculties 


TENNYS^QN  285 

were  in  abeyance,  and  Wordsworth,  though  destined  to  many 
years  of  life  and  labor,  had  quite  accomplished  his  significant 
work.  For  six  years  there  were  but  the  voices  of  such  minor 
lyrists  as  Hood  and  Keble.  Then,  in  1830,  when  the  queen 
whose  name  we  give  to  the  succeeding  era  was  l)ut  eleven  years 
old  and  still  seven  years  from  her  accession,  appeared  a  little 
vohnne  entitled  Poems,  Chiefly  Lyrical,  by  Alfred  Tennyson. 
With  this  date,  therefore,  we  may  regard  the  new  era  as  begun, 
though  a  full  dozen  years  were  yet  to  elapse  before  this  second 
])oetic  renaissance  should  gather  momentum. 

The  lives  of  the  Victorian  men  of  letters  have  been  mostly 
long  and  outwardly  peaceful,  in  contrast  to  the  often  stormy 

careers  of  their  immediate  predecessors.  Tennyson 
Alfred  ^^,^^  hmn  in  that  memorable  birth-year,  1809,  which 

/S09-1S9^^     brought  into  the  world  a  company  of  the  very  greatest 

men  of  the  century,  including  Darwin,  Gladstone, 
Lincoln,  Poe,  Chopin,  and  Mendelssohn.  He  was  the  fourth 
of  seven  sons  in  a  family  of  twelve  children;  the  Tennyson 
household,  indeed,  seems  to  have  comprised  about  one  fourth 
of  the  inhabitants  of  the  little  village  of  Somersby,  where  his 
father  was  Rector.  The  village  is  situated  in  the  comparatively 
flat  ""fen-country"  of  Ivincolnshire,  not  far  from  the  eastern 
coast.  The  poet  has  given  us  many  a  charming  picture  of  the 
region — now  of 

"The  .scvon  elms,  the  jxiplars  four 
That  stand  be.side  my  father's  door;" 
now  of  the 

"gray  twilight  pour'd 
On  dewy  pastures,  dewy  trees, 
Softer  than  sleep;" 

and  now  of  the  waste  enormous  marshes  that  "stretched  wide 
and  wild"  away  to  the  "heaped  hills  that  mound  the  sea." 
Past  the  rectory  flowed  a  brook,  in  all  probability  the  brook  that 
came  "from  haunts  of  coot  and  hern  .  .  To  bicker  down 
a  valley."     And  it  was  here  that  in  1824,  Tennyson,  evidently 


286  THE   VICTORIAN    AGE 

already  a  p^xjt,  took  so  to  heart  the  death  of  Byron.  Even 
before  that  date,  he  tells  us,  he  had  composed  "an  epic  of 
six  thousand  lines  a  la  Walter  Scott  ;*^  and  it  was  only  three 
years  after,  in  1827,  that  a  local  bookseller  published  the  ex- 
tremely juvenile  Poems  by  Two  Brothers  (Charles  and  Alfred) — 
an  event  which  the  boys  celebrated  by  hiring  a  carriage  and 
driving  off  to  the  seashore,  no  doubt  to  recite  the  verses  to  the 
music  of  the  waves.  The  poems  of  Thomson,  it  should  be 
recorded,  were  among  the  distinct  formative  influences  of  this 
period.  Scott  was  speedily  outgrown,  and  Byron  also,  save 
for  an  occasional  likeness  traceable  later  in  Tennyson's  more 
impassioned  poems,  such  as  Maud. 

Before  the  date  of  his  juvenile  venture,  Alfred  had  spent 
several  years  at  a  neighboring  Grammar  School,  but  his  best 
early  training  was  received  at  home.  In  1828,  in  company  with 
Charles,  he  joined  their  elder  brother  Frederick  at  Trinity  College, 
Cambridge,  where  Macaulay  had  been  but  four  years  before, 
an»l  Byron  but  twenty,  and  where  he  might  see  upon  the 
walls  the  portraits  of  such  eminent  predecessors  as  Bacon, 
Cowley,  Dryden,  and  Newton.  There  he  made  a  number  of 
valuable  friends,  Milnes,  for  instance,  the  biographer  of  Keats, 
ai;d  particularly  Arthur  Henry  Hallam,  son  of  the  historian, 
whom  he  was  so  soon  to  lose  and  so  deathlessly  to  mourn.  He 
won  the  Chancellor's  medal  with  a  poem,  Timlmctoo,  which, 
like  the  earlie:*  poems,  has  not  been  included  in  his  collected 
works.  But  an  important  publication  followed  in  1830 — the 
Poems,  Chiefly  Lyrical  (now  the  "Juvenilia"),  containing 
among  them  such  evidences  of  genius  as  Mariana,  Recollections 
of  the  Arabian  Nights,  The  Poet,  and  the  Ode  to  Memory.  In 
the  summer  of  the  same  year,  he  and  Hallam,  in  apparent  imi- 
tation of  Landor  and  Byron,  joined  the  Spanish  insurgents  in 
the  Pyrenees.  Two  years  later,  after  the  death  of  his  father 
and  his  withdrawal  from  Cambridge,  he  published  another 
volume,  which  contained,  among  other  notable  poems.  The  Lady 
of  Sluilott,  The  Two  Voices,  (Enone,  The  Palace  of  Art,  The  May 


TENNYSON  287 

Queen,  The  Lotos-Eaters,  and  A  Dream  of  Fair  Wmnen.  Men 
of  discernment  were  not  lacking  to  hail  in  these  volumes  the 
advent  of  a  new  poet.  But  there  was  adverse  criticism  also, 
from  the  same  conservative  sources  that  still  withheld  approval 
of  Shelley  and  Keats,  and  Tennyson  kept  silence  for  ten  years, 
maturing  his  faculties  and  taste  and  perfecting  his  already 
remarkable  technique.  Then,  in  1842,  when  public  taste  had 
doubtless  changed  through  the  waning  of  elder  authority,  he 
published  a  'revision  of  his  early  poems  and  a  new  volume 
entitled  English  Idyls,  and  Other  Pocnis.  The  English  Idyls 
(spelled  with  one  I  to  distinguish  them  from  the  Idylls  of  the 
King)  consisted  of  a  number  of  simple,  Wordsworth-like  sketches 
and  stories,  such  as  The  Gardener's  Daughter  and  Dora,  admir- 
able all,  but  not  quite  the  poet's  best.  The  best  were  to  be 
found  among  the  "other"  poems — the  majestic  epic  fragment 
of  the  Morte  d' Arthur,  the  noble  Ulysses  which,  Carlyle  inti- 
mated, had  in  it  thoughts  "too  deep  for  tears,"  and  the  lofty 
and  passionate  monologue  of  LocksUy  Hall. 

From  this  time  on  Tennyson's  right  to  a  place  among  the 
noteworthy  English  poets  was  practically  undisputed.  The 
The  Princess  in   1847  captured  its  thousands,  and  the 

Nation's  songs  which  were  added  to  it  in  1850 — "Sweet  and 
Accepted  low,"  "The  splendor  falls,"  etc. — their  tens  of  thou- 
"oet.  sands.     In   1850,  too,  appeared  In  Memoriam,  in 

a  pleasing  verse-form  that  was  virtually,  though  not  entirely, 
new;  the  poet  was  made  Poet  Laureate,  to  succeed  Words- 
worth, taking  the  laurel  "greener  from  the  brows  of  him  that 
utter'd  nothing  base;"  and  with  the  seventh  edition  of  h\^ 
poems  the  next  year  appeared  the  beautiful  dedication  To  ih" 
Queen,  a  rejected  but  characteristic  stanza  of  which  ran 

"Your  name  is  blown  on  every  wind, 
Your  flag  thro'  austral  ice  is  borne, 
And  glimmers  to  the  northern  morn, 
And  floats  in  either  golden  Ind." 


288  THE  VICTORIAN    AGE  , 

We  are  carried  back  to  Spenser's  dedication  of  the  Faerie  Queene 
to  Elizabeth,  and  it  is  a  matter  for  gratulation  that  in  two  of 
the  most  illustrious  periods  of  England's  history,  when  two  such 
revered  sovereigns  sat  upon  the  throne,  there  should  have  been 
two  such  worthy  poets  to  celebrate  the  conjunction.  Among 
other  poems  with  which  Tennyson,  in  the  words  of  the  appoint- 
ment, "adorned"  his  office,  were  the  Ode  on  the  Death  of  the 
Duke  of  Wellington  in  1852,  and  the  famous  commemoration 
of  the  heroic  charge  at  Balaclava  in  1854,  The  Charge  of  the 
Light  Brigade.  His  next  long  poem  Maud  (1855),  was  not  so 
well  received  as  the  earlier  poems,  and  there  are  still  many 
who  do  not  like  Tennyson  in  the  rdle  of  a  railer  against  social 
wrong;  but  the  poem  is  overwhelmingly  poetic,  and  few  things 
of  Tennyson's  are  more  universally  admired  than  its  central 
love-lyric,  "Come  into  the  garden,  ]\Iaud."  Four  years  later, 
he  quite  won  back  popularity  with  the  first  series,  four  in  num- 
ber, of  the  Idylls  of  the  King  (1859),  and  five  years  later  still 
with  the  most  widely  popular  of  all  his  single  volumes,  Enoch 
Arden  and  Other  Poems  (1864),  After  that,  he  continued 
the  Arthurian  Idylls  until  they  finally  made  a  rounded  book 
of  twelve  connected  poems.  He  also  attempted  drama,  writ- 
ing, besides  four  other  plays,  a  historical  trilogy  of  the  making 
of  England,  Harold,  Becket,  and  Queen  Mary.  The  reception 
of  these  was  not  flattering,  though  Becket  and  The  Cup  were 
both  successfully  staged. 

All  this  while,  Tenny.son  was  living  a  life  of  as  much  retire- 
ment as  he  could  secure,  part  of  the  time  in  a  corner  of  the  Isle 
of  Wight,  where,  shortly  after  his  marriage  in  185(),  he  purchased 
the  estate  of  Farnngford,  and  part  of  the  time  at  another  home, 
Aldworth,  in  Surrey.  A  man  of  large,  powerful  frame,  and 
striking  features,  he  was  yet  troubled  somewhat  with  a  nervous 
affection  which  made  him  very  sensitive  to  the  publicity  which 
his  fame  forced  upon  him.  In  1884  he  was  raised  to  the 
peerage,  like  Macaulay  before  him.  In  1886  he  publislied 
Locksley  Hall  Sixty   Years  After,  a  complement  of  the  early 


Mattiikw  Arnold 
Klizabrth  Barrett  Brownino 


Alfred,  I.^rd  Tkn.nyson 

UOBERT       BrOWP^INO 


TENNYSON  289 

poem,  LochsUy  Hall,  which  except  for  some  diffuseness  is  (|uite 
up  to  the  same  higli  poetic  level.  Of  the  many  poems  that  still 
succeeded  may  be  mentioned  the  biographical  Merlin  and  the 
Gleam  and  the  anticipative  Crossing  the  Bar,  both  written  in 
his  eighty-first  year.  "Mind  you  put  Crossing  the  Bar  ai  iha 
end  of  all  editions  of  my  poems,"  he  said  shortly  before  his 
death.  In  October,  1892,  he  died,  and  was  buried  in  West- 
minster Abbey  by  the  side  of  Browning. 

Tennyson  is  one  of  the  four  or  five  poets  of  the  century 

who  gave  their  lives  to  their  art  with  entire  singleness  of  devotion. 

An  evidence  of  this  is  to  be  seen  in  the  perfection 

Unfading     ^.bich  his  incessant  revision  gave  him  in  the  me- 

Poetic  .  ■  . 

^     ,.  chanics  of  his  craft.     ^Mechanics,  however,  will  not 

account  for  all.  The  perfection  which  he  attained 
has  little  of  the  formal  regularity  of  the  classical  writers. 
Indeed  he  was  condemned  at  the  outset  on  the  score  of 
extreme  irregularity.  The  perfection  lies  rather  in  lifting 
every  line  and  phrase  above  the  level  of  prose  and  partakes 
therefore  of  substance  as  well  as  of  form.  He  combined  in 
some  degree  the  music  of  both  Coleridge  and  Shelley  with  the 
color  of  Keats,  and  to  the  example  which  he  set  of  formal 
finish  is  to  be  traced  the  almost  flawless  craftsmanship  of  the 
hundreds  of  versifiers  who  have  followed  him.  But  these 
hundreds  of  versifiers  have  not  been  able  to  equal  him  in  the 
poetic  substance  with  which  he  always  filled  his  forms.  Rarely, 
except  in  a  very  few  poems  to  be  noted  below,  was  even  a  single 
line  set  down  without  something  in  it  that  only  a  poet  could 
conceive  or  phrase.  There  is  more  such  poetry  in  A  Dream 
of  Fair  Wmnen  tiian  in  all  the  minor  Victorian  poets  put  to- 
gether.    Uli/sses  alone  would  establish  a  reputation. 

It  would  be  tedious  to  enumerate  all  that  goes  to  make  up 
this  poetic  substance.  One  thing,  slight  in  itself,  but  fre(}uently 
noted,  is  the  keenness  and  minuteness  of  observation  that  j)uts 
into  his  poetry  details  which  only  the  poetic  mind  perceives 
to   be  characteristic.     Tennyson's  observation  was  not  always 


290  TUE   VICTORIAN   AGE 

true.     When  he  rode  on  the  first  railway  train  from  Liverpool 
to  Manchester,  he  made  the  strange  mistake  of  thinking  that 
the  wheels  ran  in  a  groove.     Yet  the  familiar  line 
Composite     in  Locksley  Hall, 
Character 

of  his  Verse.  "Let  the  great  world  spin  forever  down  the 

ringing  grooves  of  change," 

is  not  the  less  poetic  in  both  conception  and  execution.  It  is 
so  everywhere.  Observation  alone  would  not  give  the  result. 
The  thing  must  be  put  poetically,  and  Tennyson  always  puts 
it  so.  "The  landscape  winking  through  the  heat,"  "A  million 
emeralds  break  jrom  the  ruhy-lmdded  lime"  "By  that  old  bridge 
which,  half  in  ruins  then,  Still  makes  a  hoary  eyebrow  for  the 
gleam  Beyond  it," — a  hundred  instances  are  at  hand. 

In  this  connection  should  be  noted  the  amount  and  char- 
acter of  Tennyson's  "landscape  poetry,"  and  the  part  it  played 
in  heightening  men's  sensitiveness  to  natural  beauty.  Words- 
worth could  not  often  rest  in  the  mere  vision  of  nature,  seeking 
usually  to  give  it  transcendental  meanings.  This  acted  as 
a  veil  for  the  ordinary  observer,  who  rather  required  to  have 
the  beauties  of  nature  actually  painted  for  him.  Even  that, 
it  would  seem,  was  scarcely  sufficient.  Turner  was  all  this 
while  putting  on  canvas  such  glorious  landscapes  as  had  not 
before  been  dreamed  of,  yet  few  saw  them  until  they  were 
shamed  by  Ruskin  into  looking.  Tennyson  was  assuredly 
doing  his  part.  Take  the  Mariana  poems.  The  Miller's  Daugh- 
ter, (Eno7ie,  The  Palace  of  Art,  The  Daisy. 

*'I  climb'd  the  roofs  at  break  of  day; 
Sun-smitten  Alps  before  me  lay. 

I  stood  among  the  silent  statues, 
And  statued  pinnacles,  mute  as  they. 

"How  faintly-flush'd,  how  phantom-fair, 
Was  Monte  Rosa,  hanging  there 

A  thousand  shadowy  pencill'd  valleys 
And  snowy  dells  in  a  golden  air." 


TEMNYSON 


291 


The  ordinary  country  poetry  and  nature  poetry  of  which  English 
hterature  has  its  share  is  not  quite  the  same  thing,  as  will  be- 
come readily  apparent  from  a  study  of  a  few  of  these  delicately 
drawn  landscapes  And  along  with  this  love  of  nature  is  the 
entire  romantic  inherit- 
ance of  which  Tenny- 
son so  fully  availed 
himself.  It  is  seen  in 
the  glamour  of  the  Rec- 
ollections of  the  A  rabian 
Nights,  in  the  languor- 
ous melancholy  of  the 
Lotos-Eaters,  in  the 
weird  music  of  the  Dy- 
ing Swan,  and  in  the 
mediaeval  atmosphere 
of  The  Lady  of  Shalott, 
Sir  Galahad,  and  the 
Morte  d' Arthur,  poems 
which  led  up  finally  to 
the  great  Round  Table 
series. 

In  strong  contrast 
with  these  romantic 
traits  are  the  simplicity 
and  homely  realism 
which  Tennyson — in 
obedience  to  the  lesson 
of  his  own  Palace  of  A  rt, 
that  the  poet  should 
draw  near  to  human- 
ity— employed  in  some  of  his  work.  An  extreme  example  of 
this  is  Dora  an  idyl  which  naturally  met  with  Wordsworth's  ap- 
proval, and  which  reminded  Carlyle  "of  the  Book  of  Rutli." 
But  Tennyson  admitted  that  the  writing  of  that  poem,  gave 


SIR  Ca^AT.ATTAD. 

{From  a  painting  by  G.  F.  H'atts- 


292  TBHE  VICTORIAN   AGE 

him  much  trouble,  and  notwithstanding  the  general  success  of 
his  English  idyls,  it  is  easy  to  perceive  that  he  is  not  quite  at 
home  in  their  manner.  Sometimes  he  combined  the  rustic  sim- 
plicity with  a  deeper  and  richer  romantic  coloring,  as  in  the 
pathetic  if  ever  so  slightly  falsetto  May  Queen.  Enoch  Arden, 
too,  is  a  poem  in  whicli  the  near  and  the  far  are  strangely  blended, 
the  homely  concerns  of  humble  life  being  dressed  in  a  garb  of 
fantastic  poetry  and  set  part  of  the  time  against  a  background  of 
gorgeous  tropical  dreams.  The  combination  does  not  seem  to 
displease  the  uncritical  reader.  But  Tennyson's  success  in 
human  protraiture  is  best  exemplified  by  some  of  his  later 
dramatic  tales  and  monologues,  chiefly  in  dialect.  Not  only 
was  he,  in  these  poems,  among  the  first  to  set  the  fashion  for  a 
school  of  modern  poets,  but  in  such  characters  as  the  modern 
"  Jliz])ah"  who  gathers  uj)  for  holy  !)urial  the  bones  of  her  errant 
son,  or  the  Crrandmother  who  at  Annie's  age  "could  have  wept 
with  the  best,"  or  the  Northern  Farmer  who  questioned  "goda- 
moighty's"  judgment  in  taking  him  away  "\Vi'  aaf  the  cows  to 
cauve  an'  Thurnaby  hoiilms  to  plow,"  he  attained  to  a  dramatic 
sympathy  and  lifelikeness  such  as  he  could  not  do  elsewhere, 
not  even  in  his  long  formal  dramas.  In  all  these  poems  he  has 
shown  yet  another  side  of  his  versatile  genius,  his  ability  to  tell 
a  story.  In  sum,  he  was  a  most  freely  eclectic  poet  who  in  his 
composite  verse  has  exploited  nearly  all  poetic  methods,  and 
even  harmonized,  so  far  as  may  be,  widely  divergent  schools. 
Too  little  space  remains  for  adequate  treatment  of  the 
several  major  poems.     The  lack  of  concordant  judgment  upon 

them — one  critic  preferring  this  and  another  that — 
„'"  might  raise  the  query  whether  they  really  constitute 

Tennyson's  great  work,  however  much  of  his  best 
work  they  may,  and  undoubtedly  do,  contain.  The  Princess 
attacks  a  social  question  of  the  day,  maintaining  the  unity  of 
woman's  cause  with  man's  and  her  right  therefore  to  equal 
social  and  intellectual  privileges,  while  still  recognizing  to  the 
full   the  essential  difference  of  her  nature.     But  Ida  and  her 


TENNYSON  293 

mediaeval-modern  university  which  no  man  is  allowed  to  enter 
on  pain  of  death,  and  which  is  finally  taken  as  it  were  by  escalade 
and  storm,  are  most  fantastically  conceived.  The  story  is  a 
medley,  the  parts  of  which  are  supposed  to  be  successively 
invented  by  a  group  of  narrators  whiling  away  an  afternoon 
at  a  picnic  gathering.  It  is  extremely  diverting,  and  there 
are  many  who  find  in  it  the  poet's  happiest  effort.  Others 
feel  that  its  mock-heroic  character  leaves  a  confused  impres- 
sion; that  its  emphasis  is  false,  defeating  its  serious  aim  of 
pleading  for  the  elevation  of  woman  by  being  half  the  time 
a  satire  on  her  inordinate  demands;  and  that  it  needlessly 
harrows  the  reader's  feelings  by  e.xciting  sympathy  for  a  noble 
and  womanly  heroine  and  then  subjecting  her  to  an  undeserved 
humiliation  at  the  hands  of  some  very  unmanly  and  unman- 
nerly boys.  Indeed,  in  more  than  one  of  Tennyson's  long 
pMjems  may  be  detected  a  certain  wavering  of  purpose,  a 
want  of  unity,  which  his  most  earnest  attempts  at  revision  did 
not  avail  to  remove.  The  hero  of  Locksley  Hall  is  not  quite 
heroic  enough  in  his  capacity  of  lover  to  give  weight  to  the  in- 
comparably noble  sentiments  which  he  utters  upon  love  and  life 
in  general.  Mand  is  an  admirable  monodrama,  and  one  cannot 
but  rejoice  to  see  Tennyson,  who  too  often  played  the  drawing- 
room  poet,  let  his  masculine,  berserker  passion  loose  in  this 
poem  which  his  strait-laced  generation  so  disliked;  but  the 
Faust-like  regeneration  at  the  end  seems  artificial  because  the 
individual  drama  is  not  vitally  linked  with  the  social  one,  and  a 
national  war,  even  granting  that  its  cause  were  just  and  that  war 
could  be  a  remedy  for  the  evils  of  peace,  is  a  queer  sort  of  plaster 
for  a  man  to  apply  to  a  privately  wounded  heart.  Those  who 
feel  these  things  and  hesitate  therefore  to  admit  the  entire  great- 
ness of  the  poem,  must  find  their  account  either  in  the  story 
alone,  or  in  the  moral  alone,  or  in  the  poetry  itself,  which  at  least 
never  fails.  Even  the  Idylls  of  the  King  may  be  criticised  upon 
the  ground  of  over-idealization — that  the  hero  Arthur  is  an 
"impeccable  prig,"  and  that  the  modern  .standards  and  Christian 


294  THE  VICTORIAN   AGE 

atmosphere  are  a  total  anachronism.  Those  who  have  before- 
hand formed  their  ideas  of  the  Round  Table  from  Malory  and 
the  old  romances  are  seldom  pleased.  Others  are  disposed 
to  be  less  critical.  At  least  they  find  here  a  series  of  delightful 
stories,  told  in  a  newly  modulated,  never  wearying  blank  verse; 
with  characters  enveloped  in  a  haze  of  romance,  far  enough 
removed  from  ordinary  life  not  to  be  gauged  by  quite  ordinary 
standards,  yet  fundamentally  human,  heroic,  and  lovable;  and 
dimly  looming  through  it  all  the  overshadowing  allegory  of 
"Soul  at  war  with  Sense,"  the  symbolism  of  the  Round  Table 
as  "an  image  of  the  mighty  world,"  and  the  everlasting  truth 
of  Arthur's  parting  reassurance: 

"The  old  order  changeth,  yielding  place  to  new. 
And  God  fulfils  himself  in  many  ways, 
Lest  one  good  custom  should  corrupt  the  world." 

Lancelot  and  Elaine,  Guinevere  and  Galahad,  have  been  quite 
made  over  in  Tennyson's  hands,  but  it  is  better  that  the  thou- 
sands who  do  not  read  Malory  should  know  them  thus  than  not 
at  all. 

In  Memoriam  is  a  poem  of  a  wholly  different  kind — a 
nineteenth-century  Lycidas.     In   1833,  Arthur    Hallam,   while 

making  a  tour  on  the  continent  with  his  father,  died 
"  In  Me-  . 

,,     suddenly  at  Vienna.     The  loss  affected  Tennyson 

deeply,  and  as  he  brooded  over  it,  the  feelings  and 
thoughts  that  rose  in  him  gradually  took  the  shape  of  brief  poems 
in  quatrains  of  a  peculiar,  unvarying  form,  each  poem  expres- 
sive of  a  single  mood  or  idea, — 

"Short  swallow-flights  of  song,  that  dip 
Their  wings  in  tears,  and  skim  away." 

When  these  were  ultimately  gathered  and  arranged,  they  made 
a  long  i;>oem  not  unlike  a  sonnet-series,  in  which  may  be  traced 
the  progress  of  grief,  from  the  first  deep  sense  of  personal  loss, 
through  despair  and  doUbt  and  questioning,  to  a  conviction  of 
the  uses  of  sorrow,  and  therefore  to  faith  and  peace.     The  most 


TENNYSON  295 

beautiful  parts  are  the  earlier  ones,  such  as  the  pictures  of  the 
home-coming  of  the  ship  that  bore  Arthur's  body,  or  the  recur- 
ring descriptions  of  Christmas-tide.  The  most  deeply  passion- 
ate are  perhaps  those  central  ones  in  which  doubt  groAvs  darkest 
and  the  bereaved  questions  the  moral  order  of  the  universe: 

"Are  God  and  Nature  then  at  strife, 
That  Nature  lends  such  evil  dreams  ? 
So  careful  of  the  type  she  seems, 
So  careless  of  the  single  life.     .     .     . 

"O  life  as  futile,  then,  as  frail  ! 

O  for  thy  voice  to  soothe  and  bless  ! 
What  hope  of  answer,  or  redress  ? 
Behind  the  veil,  behind  the  veil." 

The  poet's  final  attitude  is  best  expressed  in  the  introductory 
section  which  was  written  last,  and  which  is  better  understood 
after  the  rest  has  been  read. 

In  more  than  its  mere  chronological  position  may  this  poem, 
which  grew  simply  out  of  a  personal  sorrow  and  thus  eloquently 
testified  that  the  sorrow  was  not  vain,  be  regarded  as  the  central 
poem  of  its  age.  Tennyson  always  lived  and  wrote  close  to  the 
age;  even  in  the  Idylls  of  the  King  he  did  not  get  far  away.  He 
was  an  Englishman  of  his  day,  with  a  profound  reverence  for 
law  and  a  faith  in  institutions.  His  humanitarian  interest  in 
political  progress  and  social  welfare  is  shown  in  many  things — - 
in  lines  like  those  upon  Freedom  "broadening  slowly  down," 
which  speakers  in  Parliament  are  glad  to  quote  at  need;  in  the 
Princess,  as  already  described;  in  all  the  poems  of  humble  life; 
in  the  faintly  Utopian  dreams  that  gleam  through  the  darkness 
of  Maud  and  the  two  Locksley  Halls.  His  interest  in  science 
is  seen  in  the  readiness  with  which  he  turns  its  discoveries  and 
applications  to  poetic  use,  ever  finding  therein  new  figures  to  serve 
old  truth.  It  is  seen,  too,  in  his  readiness  to  welcome  new  truth. 
The  doctrine  of  evolution,  in  particular,  which  was  taking  shape 
through  his  maturing  years,  engaged  his  earnest  attention.  It 
was  largely  this,  of  course,  that  set  him  anxiously  to  question- 


296  THE  VICTORIAN   AGE 

ing  the  "riddle  of  the  painful  earth"  and  the  ultimate 
destiny  of  man,  and  so  led  to  those  half-philosophical,  half- 
religious  poems  of  which  The  Higher  Pantheiwi,  Flower  in  the 
Crannied  Wall,  and  The  Making  of  Man  are  examples,  and  the 
total  outcome  of  which  is  simj)!}'  the  hope  and  trust  which  are 
voiced  in  these  and  a  hundred  others.  Now  nearly  all  these 
things  are  in  In  Mcmoriam,  together  with  much  of  the  poet's 
deeper  nature  and  many  of  the  finest  examples  of  his  art.  Such 
a  combination  is  not  calculated  to  make  a  unified  poem.  No 
more  than  his  other  long  poems  does  In  Mcmoriam  succeed  in 
being  that.  But  by  its  very  composite  character  it  becomes  a 
more  perfect  exponent  of  its  "divided  age"  than  a  poem  with  a 
single  aim  could  be. 

There  need  be  no  claim  that  in  this,  or  in  any  other  of  his 
works,  Tennyson  contributed  aught  of  significance  to  the  thought 

of  the  century;  his  practical  contribution,  as  has 
Summary,     been  said,  is  to  be  sought  in  his  poetic  art.     But 

he  did  contribute  to  the  higher  spiritual  life  of  the 
masses.  He  acted  as  a  medium  between  the  statesmen,  philoso- 
phers, and  scientists  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  general  reading 
public  on  the  other.  The  truths  which  the  former  discovered 
and  enunciated,  he  adorned,  doubly  insuring  them  against 
future  loss,  and  presenting  them  but  little  above  the  level  of 
common  intelligence,  where  they  would  be  of  the  widest  service. 
This  is  an  office  no  less  worthy  than  it  is  difficult  and  rare,  and 
the  Victorian  Laureate  reaped  his  reward  in  a  nation's  gratitude. 
He  was  beyond  question  the  most  widely  read  English  poet  of 
his  day,  and  he  probably  holds  that  position  still. 

In  spite  of  marked  differences,  Robert  Browning  is  very 
properly  mentioned  with  Tennyson  when  we  wish  to  name  the 
two  most  important  poets  of  the  Victorian  age.  Closely  con- 
temporaneous, and  of  almost  equal  length  of  years  and  activity, 
he  has  come  to  hold  a  position  of  equal  eminence.  His  four 
grandparents  were  respectively  of  P^nglish,  German,  Scotch, 
and  Creole   birth.     His   birthplace  was   Camberwell,   a  south 


BROWNING  297 

suburb  of  London,  but  he  divided  his  time  between  England  and 

Italy,  and  his  work  was  almost  as  cosmopolitan  in  character  as 

Tennyson's  was  distinctively  English.    His  schooling 

„  was  mostiv  private,  but  his  father  gave  him  every 

Browning,  ." 

181^-1889.    opportunity  for  study  and  general   culture.     Latin, 

French,  dancing,  riding,  fencing,  drawing,  music, — 
there  was  little  that  did  not  engage  his  wide-awake  curiosity, 
his  versatile  talents,  and  his  overflowing  energies.  Poetry  at- 
tracted him  early,  and  before  long  his  devotion  to  it  was 
as  complete  and  consecrated  as  Tennyson's.  Like  Tenny- 
son, too,  he  passed  quickly  from  the  influence  of  Byron  to  that 
of  Shelley  and  Keats.  Aroused  to  inquiry  by  a  stray  poem 
of  Shelley's  which  he  picked  up  at  a  bookstall,  he  learned  for 
the  first  time  that  such  a  poet  had  existed  and  that  he  was 
already  dead;  nor  was  it  an  easy  task  to  discover  where  the 
coveted  works  of  this  poet  might  be  procured.  Shortly  after- 
ward his  own  youthful  poem,  Pauline  (1833),  was  anonymously 
published,  and  in  this  imaginary  confession  of  a  poet's  heart 
the  adored  Shelley  is  to  be  found  apostrophized  as  the  "Sun- 
treader." 

A  year  of  fruitful  travel  in  Russia  and  Italy  ensued,  and 
then  he  published  over  his  own  name  Paracelsus  (1835),  a  blank- 
verse  dialogue,  in  substance  a  variation  upon  the  old  theme, 
so  alluring  to  young  poets,  of  the  passion  for  knowledge.  These 
poems  found  recognition  but  brought  no  fame;  nor  did  those 
which  immediately  succeeded  them,  though  SordeUo  (1840), 
the  most  difficult  of  his  works  to  read,  unfortunately  established 
that  reputation  for  obscurity  from  which  he  never  quite  freed 
himself.  Then,  slowly,  by  the  series  of  Bells  and  Pomegranates 
(1841-1846),  containing  the  dramas  Pippa  Passes,  A  Blot  in 
the  'Scutcheon,  Colombe's  Birthday,  and  a  long  list  of  now  very 
familiar  Dramatic  Lyrics  aiui  Romances;  by  Christmas-Eve 
and  Easter-Day  in  1850;  by  Men  and  Women  in  1855;  and  by 
Dramatis  Personae  in  1864,  he  wrung  from  the  public  a  suffrage, 
though  never  such  a  popularity  as  was  accorded  to  Tenny- 


298  THE  VICTORIAN   AGE 

son.     Meanwhile    the    poetess,    Elizabeth    Barrett,    whom    in 

1846  he  had  made  Mrs.  Browning,  carrying  her  off  in  cavalier 

fashion  against  an  unreasonable  father's  will,  had  brought  him 

fifteen  years  of  rare  companionship  and  domestic  felicity.     These 

years  were  spent  in  Italy,  mostly  in  residence  in  the  old  palace 

called  Casa  Guidi,  in  Florence,  where  so  much  of  the  best  work 

of  both  was  done,  and   where  Mrs.   Browning  died   in  1861. 

After  her  death,  the  poet  returned  to  England,  but  usually  passed 

his  summers  in  Brittany.     In  1868  he  published  The  Ring  and 

the  Book,  a  poem  of  twenty  thousand  lines,  not,  it  may  be,  his 

greatest  work,  but  certainly  a  magnum  opus  in  more  respects 

than  size.     His  amazing  productivity  never  failed  him,  and  he 

continued  to  write  poems  of  varying  quality  to  the  very  last.     His 

later  years  were  spent  much  in  society,  in  strong  contrast  to 

the  reclusive  habits  of  Tennyson.     In  1889  he  felt  drawn  to  Italy 

again,  and  there,  at  his  son's  home  on  the  Grand  Canal,  in 

Venice,  he  suddenly  died,  on  the  very  day  on  which  his  Asolando 

was   published   in   London.     He  was  buried   in   Westminster 

Abbey,  on  the  last  day  of  the  year. 

Browning's  earliest  work  showed  clearly  the  direction  which 

his  poetic  genius  was   to  take  and  to  keep  without  material 

departure  all  through  life.     Poetry  with  him  was 

A  Meta-       seldom  an  end  in  itself;   the  mere  creation  of  verbal 

Vv        ,•       music  and  beauty,  he  deemed  relatively  unimportant. 
Dramatic  .  •  •'  ^ 

Poet.  What  he  was  interested  in  was  the  human  soul — 

"little  else,"  he  declared,  "is  worth  study;"  and 
he  constantly  takes  for  his  theme  the  development  of  the  soul, 
or  rather  special  moments  in  that  development,  employing  poetry 
because  it  is  the  best  instrument  for  his  purpose.  This  is  what 
is  meant  by  calling  him  a  metaphysical  or  psychological  poet.  It 
must  not  be  inferred,  however,  that  he  works  abstractly,  after 
the  method  of  philosophy.  He  works  concretely,  as  a  poet 
should.  It  is  always  the  soul  in  a  body,  and  in  a  very  definite 
body — Luria's,  Pompilia's,  Guido's,  Fra  Lippo  Lippi's,  Saul's. 
This  personality,  moreover,  is  vividly  set  in  its  proper  environ- 


BROWNING  299 

merit.  Loud  or  low,  there  is  always  the  buzz  of  the  Roman 
populace  about  Porapilia's  tragedy;  the  red  roofs  of  the  houses 
smoke  in  the  sun,  or  the  scanty  snowflakes  of  winter  flitter 
through  the  air;  and  no  detail  of  the  murder  is  spared,  down  to 
the  notches  on  the  edge  of  the  triangular-bladed  Genoese  dag- 
ger that  did  the  ghastly  work.  Andrea  del  Sarto  sits  by  the 
window  and  meditates  upon  his  failure,  while  the  chapel-bell 
hushes  amid  the  evening  stillness  and  the  Fiesolan  autumn 
landscape  fades  into  a  twilight-piece  like  a  symbol  of  his  own 
life.  Saul  in  his  spiritual  agony  is  revealed  erect  and  motionless 
in  his  tent,  with  arms  outstretched  on  the  cross-poles,  while 
David  tunes  his  harp  to  find  the  song  that  shall  ease  his  suffering. 

"At  the  first  I  saw  naught  but  the  blackness:  but  soon  I  descried 
A  something  more  black  than  the  blackness — the  vast,  the  upright 
Main  prop  which  sustains  the  pavilion:  and  slow  into  sight 
Grew  a  figure  against  it,  gigantic  and  blackest  of  all. 
Then  a  sunbeam,  that  burst  through  the  tent-roof,  showed  Saul. 

"He  stood  as  erect  as  that  tent-prop,  both  arms  stretched  out  wide 
On  the  great  cross-support  in  the  centre,  that  goes  to  each  side ; 
He  relaxed  not  a  muscle,  but  hung  there  as,  caught  in  his  pangs 
And  waiting  his  change,  the  king-serpent  all  heavily  hangs, 
Far  away  from  his  kind,  in  the  pine,  till  deliverance  come 
With  the  spring-time, — so  agonized  Saul,  drear  and  stark,  blind 
and  dumb." 

If,  then,  Browning  is  a  metaphysical  poet,  it  is  evident  that 
he  is  at  the  same  time  an  intensely  dramatic  poet.  That  is  to 
say,  he  employs  the  dramatic  method  of  putting  before  us  indi- 
viduals under  such  conditions  of  actual  life  as  serve  to  develop 
or  at  least  accentuate  the  spiritual  drama.  In  the  pursuit  of 
this  method  he  shows  some  self-chosen  limitations.  He  does 
not  work  in  Shakespeare's  broad  way.  A  few  characters,  or  even 
one,  suffice,  and  the  drama  itself  is  so  essentially  of  the  inmost 
soul  that  his  plays,  even  those  in  regular  dramatic  form,  do  not 
meet  the  external  refjuirements  of  a  perfect  stage  production. 
Neither  does  he  attempt  wholly  to  sink  his  own  personality. 


300  THE   VICTORIAN   AGE 

The  words  and  ctnotions  employed  seem  sometimes  better  to 
befit  the  poet  than  his  puppets,  especially  when  he  is  dealing 
with  personages  not  of  his  own  intellectual  level.  Again,  he 
limits  himself  very  largely  to  the  portrayal  of  highly  dramatic 
moments,  neglecting,  for  these,  the  slower,  progressive  develop- 
ment that  we  are  accustomed  to  look  for  in  drama.  The  result 
of  this  is  the  sacrifice  of  action  and  minor  incident,  and  most  of 
that  by-play,  comic  or  sentimental,  which  doubtless  makes  for 
popularity. 

Browning  has,  indeed,  methods  of  making  his  drama  com- 
plicated. A  peculiar  example  is  Pippa  Passes,  in  which  a  single 
thread  holds  loosely  together  four  several  crises  in  lives  that  are 
totally  unrelated.  The  scene  of  the  drama  is  Asolo,  in  the 
Trevisan.  A  woman  and  her  lover  have  murdered  her  hus- 
band; a  sculptor  has  been  deceived  into  bringing  home  a  bride 
who  is  unworthy  of  him;  an  Italian  patriot  has  resolved  to  kill 
the  Austrian  emperor;  a  bishop  is  plotting  the  destruction  of 
Pippa  whose  heritage  he  unlawfully  holds — all  this  on  one 
day,  the  single  day  in  the  year  Avhich  Pippa,  the  poor  silk- 
winder,  has  for  a  holiday.  Through  these  lives  Pippa  accident- 
ally passes  with  her  singing. 

"  The  year's  at  the  spring 
And  day's  at  the  morn; 
Morning's  at  seven; 
The  hillside's  dew-pearled ; 
The  lark's  on  the  wing; 
The  snail's  on  the  thorn : 
God's  in  his  heaven — 
All's  right  with  the  world!" 

There  is  no  contact  with  the  other  characters  except  through 
this  singing.  But  in  each  case  the  songs  work  a  moral  revolu- 
tion, and  Pippa  goes  to  bed  at  night  quite  unconscious  of  all  she 
has  been  the  instrument  of,  singing  once  more,  in  the  same 
\inconsciousness,  before  she  goes  to  sleep: 


BROWNING  301 

"All  service  ranks  the  same  with  God — 
With  God,  whose  puppets,  best  and  worst, 
Are  we;  there  is  no  last  nor  first." 

In  the  higher  view,  the  accident  is  of  course  no  accident;  tlie 

word  "passes"  carries  wath  it  one  of  the  subtlest  of  ironies.     In 

Pippa,  therefore,  the  drama  centres;  through  her  it  acquires 

a  certain  complexity,  and  from  her  and  her  simple  actions  and 

interests  it  derives  both  its  greatest  significance  and  its  charm. 

At  the  same  time,  in  its  separate  scenes,  the  play  is  also  an 

interesting  example  of  Browning's  tendency  always  to  construct 

his  poems,  w^hether  dramas  or  not,  out  of  spiritual  crises. 

In  following  this  tendency  he  came  to  adopt  a  form  which 

he  used  persistently  and  which  is  almost  exclusively  associated 

with  his  name — the  form  of  the  dramatic  monologue. 

The  lihe  dramatic  monologue  differs  from  a  soliloquy  in 

Dramatic  .        ,i  »  ,  ,       . 

.,      ,  assummg  the  presence  or  a  second  person  who  is 

addressed  or  answered  or  argued  with,  though  one 

person  alone  speaks,  the  speech  or  action  of  the  other  being 

wholly  inferred.     Tennyson  used   something    approaching    it 

in  his  early  poems — in  the  May  Queen,  for  instance,  and  Si. 

Simeon   Stylites.     Landor's   prose   Conversations,    too,    are   at 

times  virtually  monologues,  since  one  speaker  is  such  a  mere 

foil  that  he  could  easily  be  suppressed.     But  Browning  worked 

toward  the  method  independently,  and  he  alone  worked  it  out 

fully.     His  Dramatic  Lyrics  and  Romances,  Men  and  Women, 

and  Dramatis  Personx  contain  a  number  of  such  monologues — 

in  each  a  person  revealing  his  character  at  some  "psychological 

moment"  of  his  life.     My  Last  Duchess,  Andrea  del  Sarto,  and 

The  Bishop  Orders  his   Tomb  at  Saint  Praxcd's  Church  are 

t^-pical  examples,  while  others,  like  James  Lee's  Wife,  or  Abt 

Vofjler,  are  very  similar.    The  Bishop  Orders  his  Tomb  is  a  picture 

of  jealousy  and  the  passion  for  luxury  strong  in  death,  for  the 

dying  bishop  gives  minute  directions  to  his  sons  and  nephews 

for  such  a  rich  adornment  of  his  jasper  tomb  as  shall  completely 

outshine   his    rival's — "Old    Gandolf   with    his   paltry   onion- 


302  THE   VICTORIAN    AGE 

stone."  The  wonderful  thing  is  the  way  in  which  the  poet  has 
entered  into  the  character  of  his  subject,  a  man  who  has  con- 
centrated into  his  Ufe  the  color  and  spirit  of  Renaissance 
Italy,  from  its  villas  and  vineyards  to  its  Greek  manuscripts 
and  gorgeous  church  walls.  Or  take  for  a  revelation  of  another 
kind,  the  picture  of  James  Lee's  faithful  wife  sitting  by  the 
fireside  and  musing  on  the  wreck  that  threatens  her  happiness 
in  the  loss  of  her  husband's  love : — 

"Is  all  our  fire  of  shipwreck  wood, 
Oak  and  pine  ? 
Oh,  for  the  ills  half-understood, 
The  dim  dead  woe 
Long  ago 
Befallen  this  bitter  coast  of  France! 
Well,  poor  sailors  took  their  chance; 
I  take  mine. 

"A  ruddy  shaft  our  fire  must  shoot 

O'er  the  sea : 
Do  sailors  eye  the  casement — mute. 

Drenched  and  stark, 

From  their  bark — 
And  envy,  gnash  their  teeth  for  hate 
O'  the  warm  safe  house  and  happy  freight 

— Thee  and  me  ? 

"God  help  you,  sailors,  at  your  need  ! 
Spare  the  curse  ! 
For  some  ships,  safe  in  port  indeed. 
Rot  and  rust. 
Run  to  dust. 
All  through  worms  i'  the  wood,  which  crept. 
Gnawed  our  hearts  out  while  we  slept : 
That  is  worse." 

In  neither  of  these  instances  is  the  drama  wholly  individual, 
and  in  the  latter  especially  it  is  imaginatively  broadened  in  its 
scope  to  include  perhaps  most  of  the  tragedy  of  life. 

In  The  Ring  and  the  Book  the  treatment  of  a  special  dra- 
matic situation  and  the  monologue  method  are  together  carried 


BROWNING  303 

out  on  an  epic  scale.  On  a  bookstall  in  Florence,  Browning 
one  day  picked  up  a  parchment-covered  book  which  proved  to 
be  a  full  account  of  a  murder  and  trial  that  had  once  taken 
place  in  Rome.  His  fancy  was  set  working  until  the  whole 
train  of  events  reshaped  themselves  in  his  mind.  The  "ring" 
is  symbolical  of  the  circle  of  evidence  that  was  forged  about  the 
crime,  and  reforged,  goldsmith-wise,  in  his  own  brain.  The 
twelve  long  books  of  the  poem  are  given  to  a  rehearsal  of  the 
same  story  from  different  points  of  view,  and  of  course  with 
different  conclusions, — Half-Rome's,  the  Other  Half-Rome's, 
Guido  the  husband's,  Pompilia  the  wife  and  victim's,  Capon- 
sacchi  the  priest's,  the  Pope's,  etc.  More  in  regard  to  the  poem 
need  not  here  be  said,  save  that  it  sustains  interest  and  main- 
tains the  poetic  level  remarkably  well  for  so  monotonous  a 
scheme.  But  it  shows  that  Browning  was  becoming  confirmed 
in  his  love  for  psychological  analysis  and  was  pushing  it  per- 
ilously close  to  the  further  verge  of  poetic  and  dramatic  possi- 
bility. In  fact,  from  the  date  of  this  poem  onward  his  work 
grew  less  and  less  emotional,  though  he  never  lost  the  lyric 
touch  which  in  many  a  minor  poem  still  served  to  vary  the  effect 
of  his  more  ponderous  undertakings. 

The  reputed  obscurity  of  Browning's  verse  should  not  be 
allowed  to  deter  one  from  approaching  it.     So  far  as  the  ob- 
scurity exists  it  is  partly  inseparable  from  the  nature 
Obscurity      ^f  jjjg  themes,  however  concretely  he  may  present 

„  ,  them.  Again,  the  form  he  adopts,  that  of  the  dra- 
Ruggedness.  11  i  1  •  u  .1 

matic  monologue,  leaves  large  gaps  which  must  be 

filled  by  the  reader's  imagination;  and  the  same  thing  results  from 
his  practice  of  presenting  chiefly  dramatic  crises.  A  last  diffi- 
culty lies  in  his  extreme  condensation — that  chariness  of  speech 
which  impelled  him  to  reduce  phrases  to  single  compound  words 
and  freely  to  elide  pronouns,  articles,  and  conjunctions.  But 
none  of  these  things  offer  obstructions  which  an  earnest  reader 
will  not  willingly  face  and  surmount,  or  even  find  agreeably 
stimulative.     A   more   serious   objection   lies   in   the   frequent 


304  THE  VICTORIAN   AGE 

niggedness  of  his  verse.  This  does  not  point  to  any  incapacity. 
Browning  simply  does  not  regard  sound  in  poetry  as  of  sufficient 
importance  to  warrant  sacrificing  to  it  any  desirable  shade  of 
sense.  If  it  is  a  question  of  a  lyric  only,  he  can  be  as  lyrical  as 
another.  When  other  matters  press,  melody  is  ignored.  This, 
I)erhaps,  is  well.  But  sometimes  the  practice  seems  to  be  car- 
ried to  perversity.  When  we  find  poems  that  would  actually 
yield  their  meaning  more  readily  if  they  were  stripped  of  their 
capital  letters  and  printed  as  prose,  something  is  wrong;  for  to 
print  normal  poetry  thus  would  be  to  work  confusion.  Metre 
and  rhyme  are  not  fulfilling  their  office  when  to  obscure  them 
is  to  bring  illumination.  The  simple  fact  is  that  Browning 
in  a  few  poems  has  chosen  to  rhyme  words  which  do  not  require 
and  will  not  bear  the  enforcement  that  rhyme  always  tends  to 
give.  Aside  from  this,  through  a  far  more  extensive  portion  of 
his  work  we  are  often  made  to  chafe  at  ruggedness  and  dis- 
sonance that  seem  unnecessary,  and  that  surely  could  have  been 
avoided  if  the  poet  had  chosen  to  write  less  and  attach  more 
importance  to  form. 

On  the  other  hand,  such  of  his  verse  as  is  lyrical  it  is  diffi- 
cult not  to  praise  in  extravagant  language.     One  thinks,   in 
illustration,  of  a  score  of  poems — of  the  Cavalier 
'     '  Tunes,  of  How  they  Brought  the  Good  News,  of 

The  Last  Ride  Together;  of  the  songs  in  the  dramas 
and  elsewhere — "Over  the  sea  our  galleys  went,"  "There's  a 
woman  like  a  dew-drop,"  "Oh,  Love — no,  Love!"  "As  I  ride, 
as  I  ride,"  "I  send  my  heart  up  to  thee," — 

"  T  sond  my  heart  up  to  thoe,  all  my  heart 
In  this  my  singing. 
For  the  stars  help  mo  and  the  soa  bears  [lart; 

The  very  night  is  clinging 
Closer  to  Venice'  streets  to  leave  one  space 
Above  me,  whence  thy  face 
May  light  my  joyous  heart  to  thee  its  dwelling-place." 

(In  a  Gondola.) 


BROWNING  305 

Or  one  thinks  of  the  blank-verse  modulation  of  that  wonderful 
description  of  midsummer  night  near  the  beginning  of  The 
Ring  and  the  Book,  or  of  the  solemn  majesty  of  the  songs  of 
David  in  Said,  or  of  the  impressive  chant  of  the  disciples  who, 
in  A  Grammarian's  Funeral,  carry  the  dead  body  of  their  master 
up  the  mountain  for  burial: — 

"Sleep,  crop  and  herd  !  sleep,  darkling  thorpe  and  croft. 

Safe  from  the  weather  ! 
He,  whom  we  convoy  to  his  grave  aloft, 

Singing  together, 
He  was  a  man  born  with  thy  face  and  throat. 

Lyric  Apollo  ! 
Long  he  lived  nameless :  how  should  Spring  take  note 

Winter  would  follow  ?" 

In  the  select  choir  of  England's  greatest  singers  Browning  has 

his  place. 

The  most  distinctive  place  reserved  to  him,  however,  is 

among  the  inspirers  of  moral  resolution  and  confidence.     His 

r.  7  *•  poems  are  as  tonic  as  wind  and  sun.  This  bracing 
Resolution  ...  .  ° 

fjpd  quality  is  especially  to  be  felt  in  such  a  poem  as 

Optimism.     Prospice,  with  its  ringing  lines, 

"  I  was  ever  a  fighter,  so — one  fight  more. 
The  best  and  the  last  !" — 

in  The  Statue  and  the  Bust,  with  its  exhortation, 

"Let  a  man  contend  to  the  uttermost 
For  his  life's  set  prize,  be  it  what  it  will  !"— 

or  in  the  dauntless  perseverance  that  gives  a  moral  significance 
to  the  strange  story  and  stranger  imagery  of  Childe  Roland  to 
the  Dark  Tower  Came.  It  is  to  be  felt  also  in  poems  of  a  very 
different  character — the  poems  of  love  and  of  religious  faith. 
Browning  has  been  regarded  as  one  of  the  foremost  of  the  mod- 
ern poets  of  love.  For  his  high  conception  of  romantic  love, 
of  the  joy  and  sanctity  of  "two  hearts  beating  each  to  each,"  it 
is  sufficient  to  cite  The  Last  Ride  Together,  or  the  tender  apos- 
trophe to  his  wife  in  The  Ring  and  the  Book  (Book  I.) : 


306  THE   VICTORIAN   AGE 

"O  lyric  Love,  half-angel  and  half-bird, 
And  all  a  wonder  and  a  wild  desire!" 

And  love  in  the  largest  sense,  as  a  divine  principle  working 
through  all  nature,  is  at  the  very  centre  of  Browning's  creed.  His 
is  the  heartiest,  hopefullest,  most  cheering  poetic  voice  that  his 
age  has  raised.  He  stands  apart  from  most  others  of  his  kind 
and  his  age  in  the  positiveness  of  his  religious  faith,  a  faith 
that  is  based  upon  a  conviction  of  the  conquering  universality 
of  love  and  self-sacrifice.  Two  facets  of  this  faith  are  flashed 
from  the  noble  poems  of  A  Death  in  the  Desert  and  Rabbi  Ben 
Ezra.  And  the  same  thing  rises  almost  to  defiance  in  the 
stanzas  of  that  Epilogue  which  rings  out  like  a /triumphant 
ptean  among  the  half-hearted  hopes  and  quavering  prayers  of  a 
sceptical  generation: 

* '  One  who  never  turned  his  back  but  marched  breast  forward. 
Never  doubted  clouds  would  break. 
Never  dreamed,  though  right  were  worsted,  wrong  would  triumph. 
Held  we  fall  to  rise,  are  baffled  to  fight  better. 
Sleep  to  wake. 

"No,  at  noonday  in  the  bustle  of  man's  work-time 
Greet  the  unseen  with  a  cheer! 
Bid  him  forward,  breast  and  back  as  either  should  be, 
'Strive  and  thrive!'  cry  'Speed,' — fight  on,  fare  ever 
There  as  here!" 

Elizabeth  Barrett,  who  was  bom  in  Herefordshire  in  1806, 

was  the  daughter  of  an  English  country  gentleman,  the  owner 

of  estates  in  Jamaica.     At  the  age  of  fifteen  she 

Elizabeth       injured  her  spine  while  tightening  her  pony's  sad- 

H  HTTP  ft 

„  die-girths  and  remained  an  invalid  for  many  years. 

Browning,  '^  . 

1806-1861.  S"^  ^^'^  ^"  ardent  love  of  Greek  literature,  and 
published,  in  1833,  a  version  of  vEschylus's  Prome- 
theus Bound,  along  with  other  poems.  More  important  volumes 
were  The  Seraphim  in  1838  and  Poems  in  1844.  By  the  latter 
she  attained  a  celebrity  shared  among  rising  poets  perhaps  only 
by  Tennyson,  for  Browning  was  still  but  little  known.     She 


BROWNING  307 

herself  was  not  then  personally  acquainted  with  the  latter,  but 
she  knew  his  poetry,  and  several  lines  in  her  1844  volume  (in 
Ijady  Geraldines  Courtship)  alluding  to  the  "blood-tinctured 
heart"  and  "veined  humanity"  of  his  Pomegranates  brought 
about  an  acquaintance,  which  resulted  in  love,  marriage,  health, 
and  the  happy  life  in  Italy  already  described.  There,  after 
fifteen  years,  she  died,  at  Florence,  in  her  husband's  arms. 

Mrs.  Browning's  poems,  like  her  husband's,  are  both  dra- 
matic and  lyric,  but  the  dramatic  portion  can  be  ignored.  She 
is  pre-eminently  an  emotional  poet,  and  in  that  lies  her  weakness 
as  well  as  her  strength.  She  had  not  the  serene  control  of  her 
faculties  so  essential  to  the  dramatist,  who  must  "see  life  steadily 
and  see  it  whole."  Nor  did  she  ever  acquire  the  perfect  taste 
and  the  sense  of  proportion  and  repose  which  her  study  of 
Greek  should  have  taught  her.  Her  longest  poem,  Aurora 
Leigh  (1856),  a  kind  of  novel  in  blank  verse,  but  intensely 
subjective  and  full  of  theories  about  life  and  art,  suffers  from 
these  defects.  She  did  better  with  themes  that  engaged  chiefly 
her  feelings,  as  in  the  lyrical  effusions  of  Cmvper's  Grave,  The 
Dead  Pan,  The  Lay  of  the  Broion  Rosary,  The  Rhyme  of  the 
Duchess  May,  or  in  the  poems  called  forth  by  her  exquisite 
sensitiveness  to  human  suffering,  like  The  Cry  of  the  Children 
and  Casa  Guidi  Windows  (1851).  The  last  named  was  inspired 
by  the  Italian  struggle  for  freedom,  and  takes  its  title  from  her 
Florentine  home,  where,  through  the  middle  years  of  the  century, 
she  was  a  witness  of  many  moving  spectacles  that  attended  the 
struggle.  But  time  already  begins  to  lay  a  cold  hand  upon  this 
work,  and  it  look*  now  as  if  only  a  group  of  personal  poems, 
the  series  of  sonnets  which  were  written  at  the  time  of  her  court- 
ship, will  be  cherished  by  the  readers  of  to-morrow.  She  did 
not  show  these  poems  to  her  husband  until  after  their  marriage, 
and  she  published  them  disguisedly  in  1850  as  Sonnets  from  the 
Portuguese.  We  know  them  now  for  what  they  are,  the  intimate 
record  of  a  sensitive  soul  under  the  most  ennobling  of  human 
experiences;  and  we  are  disposed,  moreover,  to  regard  them  as 


308  THE  VICTORIAN   AGE 

among  the  best  sonnets  in  a  literature  which  has  been  by  no 
means  poor  in  the  kind. 

"I  thought  once  how  Theocritus  had  sung 
Of  the  sweet  years,  the  dear  and  wished-for  years, 
Who  each  one  in  a  gracious  hand  appears 
To  bear  a  gift  for  mortals,  old  or  young : 
And,  as  I  mused  it  in  his  antique  tongue, 
I  saw,  in  gradual  vision  through  my  tears. 
The  sweet,  sad  years,  the  melancholy  years. 
Those  of  my  own  life,  who  by  turns  had  flung 
A  shadow  across  me.     Straightway  I  was  'ware, 
So  weeping,  how  a  mystic  Shape  did  move 
Behind  me,  and  drew  me  backward  by  the  hair; 
And  a  voice  said  in  mastery,  while  I  strove, — 
'Guess  now  who  holds  thee?'     'Death!'  I  said.     But,  there. 
The  silver  answer  rang, — 'Not  Death,  but  Love.'  " 

A  much  more  obscure  poet  in  his  day,  but  one  who  has 
steadily  advanced   into   that   secondary   rank   to  which   Mrs. 

Browning  has  as  steadily  declined,  was  the  shy  and 
P .  . ,  somewhat  epicurean  Edward  Fitzgerald,  a  Cambridge 
1809-1883     gTaduate,  and  a  friend  of  Tennyson,  Thackeray,  and 

Carlyle.  Fitzgerald  was  always  interested  in,  and  in- 
timate with,  the  best  of  literature  in  many  languages,  but  he  kept 
himself  out  of  public  sight  as  a  retired  country  gentleman  in  his 
Suffolk  home,  and  published  nothing  until  he  was  past  forty. 
He  occupied  himself  chiefly  with  translations  in  the  form  of  free 
paraphrase,  producing  thus  in  1856  Six  Dramas  of  Calderon, 
and  some  years  later  versions,  or  "  per- versions,"  as  he  modestly 
called  them,  of  the  Agamemnon  of  .'Eschylus  and  the  two 
CEdipus  tragedies  of  Sophocles.  These  are  of  considerable 
merit,  and  together  with  the  delightfully  original  letters  pub- 
lished since  his  death,  would  give  him  a  very  respectable  place 
in  literature.  But  he  has  won  a  much  higher  place,  not  only  of 
honor  but  of  wide  influence,  with  another  of  his  unambitious 
paraphrases,  the  now  universally  known  Rubdiydt,  of  the  Per- 
sian poet  and  astronomer,  Omar  Khayyam.     These  rubdiydt, 


ARNOLD  309 

or  quatrains,  were  published  in  1859,  surviving  unnoticed  on 
the  bookstalls  until  Rossetti  and  Swinburne  discovered  and 
proclaimed  their  merits.  Their  influence  upon  poets  was 
immediate:  Mr.  Swinburne,  for  instance,  employed  their  novel 
Oriental  verse-form  in  his  Laus  Veneris,  and  it  is  possible  that 
Tennyson  himself  had  learned  of  the  rhyme-scheme  through 
Fitzgerald,  since  Tennyson  was  ringing  changes  upon  it  with 
classical  metres  in  the  early  fifties.  The  public  came  to  heel 
more  slowly,  but  very  enthusijistically  when  it  did  come,  and  there 
has  been  a  deluge  of  Omar  versions  since.  But  they  have  served 
only  to  fix  more  impregnably  in  the  first  place  this  early  para- 
phrase, in  which,  by  judicious  selection,  combination,  and, 
above  all,  true  poetic  imagination,  Fitzgerald  imbued  with  his 
own  unique  genius  the  strangely  imjoyous  live-for-the-p resent 
philosophy  of  the  Persian  fatalist. 

"Come,  fill  the  Cup,  and  in  the  fire  of  Spring 
Your  Winter-garment  of  Repentance  fling: 

The  Bird  of  Time  has  but  a  little  way 
To  flutter — and  the  Bird  is  on  the  Wing." 

"Alas,  that  Spring  should  vanish  with  the  Rose! 
That  Youth's  sweet-scented  Manuscript  should  close! 

The  Nightingale  that  in  the  Branches  sang, 
Ah,  whence,  and  whither  flown  again,  who  knows!" 

Moving  forward  a  decade  we  come  to  the  name  of  one  who, 
with  Tennyson  and  Browning,  makes  up  the  trio  of  great  poets 

of  the  middle  Victorian  period.     The  life  of  Matthew 

Matthew        Arnold  was  wholly  academic  and  uneventful,  though, 

'         as  we  shall  see,  there  was  not  a  little  stress  within — 

stress,  indeed,  from  which  he  might  have  been  saved 
had  there  been  more  excitement  without.  He  was  the  son  of 
Dr.  Thomas  Arnold,  the  great  educational  reformer  and  head- 
master of  Rugby  who  has  been  so  admiringly  portrayed  in 
Thomas  Hughes's  Tom  Brovnis  Schooldays.  His  own  education 
was  obtained  at  Rugby  and  at  Oxford — Oxford,  which,  in 
his   life-long    submission    to    her  charm,   he  characterized  as 


310  THE  VICTORIAN   AGE 

"so  venerable,  so  lovely,  so  unravaged  by  the  fierce  intellectual 
life  of  our  century,  so  serene!"  Most  of  his  life  was  spent  as 
'an  inspector  of  schools,  much  of  it  in  the  patient  drudgery  of 
reading  examination  papers.  He  held  the  Chair  of  Poetry  at 
Oxford  from  1857  to  1807.  Besides  travelling  much  on  the 
continent,  he  visited  America  twice,  in  1883-4  and  1886,  lectur- 
ing extensively  on  the  former  occasion.  As  a  man  he  was 
extremely  genial  and  urbane,  but  with  an  affected  manner  that 
caused  him  to  be  often  misunderstood  by  those  who  did  not  know* 
him  well. 

Arnold's  prose,  which  is  critical  and  not  creative  and  which 
belongs  wholly  to  the  latter  part  of  his  life,  will  be  more  properly 
treated  in  another  chapter.  His  poetry  was  mostly  the  work 
of  his  earlier  years.  A  small  volume.  The  Strayed  Reveller  and 
Other  Poems,  appeared  in  1849.  Empedocles  on  Etna,  a.  philo- 
sophical poem  in  semi-dramatic  form,  was  published  in  1852 
and  almost  immediately  withdrawn.  Two  series  of  collected 
Poems  appeared  in  1853  and  1855,  the  former  containing  Sohrab 
and  Rustum,  The  Scholar-Gipsy,  etc.,  and  a  volume  of  New 
Poems  (Thyrsis,  etc.)  in  1867.  This  almost  completes  the 
account,  which  in  its  meagreness  and  in  the  short  period  of  its 
production,  as  well  as  in  its  character,  stands  in  strong  contrast 
to  the  rich  and  prolonged  fruitage  of  Arnold's  two  great  con- 
temporaries. 

At  a  first  glance,  indeed,  Arnold's  poetry  may  well  seem  not 

only  meagre  in  amount,  but  narrow  in  scope,  monotonous,  and 

even  forbidding.     But  closer  scrutiny  will  discover 

,  „,    .     a  considerable  richness  and  varietv.     It  is  commonly 
ana  Elegiac  .      .      "  •' 

Verse.  assumed  that  he  had   an   indifferent  ear  for  metre. 

As  a  matter  of  fact  he  deliberately  set  himself 
against  the  excessive  mellifluousness  which  characterizes  much 
of  Tennyson's  verse.  He  constantly  experimented  with  irregular 
choral  measures,  often  unrhymed  or  but  slightly  softened  by 
assonance.     In  most  of  these  experiments  it  cannot  be  held 


ARNOLD  311 

that  he  succeeded,  though  an  occasional  improvisation  like 
Philomela  may  seem  satisfying : 

"Hark!  ah,  the  nightingale — 
The  tawny-throated! 

Hark,  from  that  moonlit  cedar  what  a  burst! 
What  triumph!  hark! — what  pain!" 

In  certain  severer  poems,  too,  such  as  Heine's  Grave,  or  Rugby 
Chapel  (written  in  commemoration  of  his  father),  the  rugged- 
ness  of  the  form  is  so  far  redeemed  by  the  intense  sincerity  of  the 
substance  that  it  cannot  be  felt  to  be  unfitting.  On  the  other 
hand  sometimes  a  genuine  and  irresistible  IjTic  strain  creeps  in 
with  rh}Tne,  and  we  get  the  wavelike,  melancholy  movement 
of  Dover  Beach  or  the  haunting  melody  of  The  Forsaken  Mer- 
man. It  is  strange  that  this  last  poem  should  take  us  back  to  a 
snatch  of  song  in  one  of  Dryden's  operas, — 

"Old  father  Ocean  calls  my  tide; 
Come  away!  come  away!" 

but  so  it  is.  Of  this  whole  poem,  indeed,  which  appeared 
in  his  earliest  volume,  there  is  much  more  to  be  said  than 
that  it  is  rarely  l\Tical.  Not  only  is  it  filled  with  the  sounds 
and  scents  of  the  ocean  beaches,  and  with  pictures  as 
sharp  or  as  soft  as  sunlight  and  sea-air  or  moon-light  can 
make  them — of  the  "white-wall'd  town"  and  the  "little 
grey  church  on  the  windy  hill"  and  the  "heaths  starr'd  with 
broom";  not  only  does  it  throb  and  cry  with  human  love 
and  anguish;  but  it  would  be  hard  to  point  to  another  poem  in 
literature  in  which  the  imagination  has  penetrated  so  far  beyond 
the  merely  earthly  and  human  into  a  realm  and  life  that  are  not 
of  either.  The  merman,  whom  a  creature  of  earth,  Margaret, 
has  forsaken  at  the  call  of  the  Easter  bells,  follows  her  from  his 
sand-strewn  caverns  into  the  town,  climbs  on  the  gravestones 
outside  the  church,  and  through  the  small  leaded  panes  beholds 
her  with  her  eyes  sealed  to  a  book,  while  "loud  prays  the  priest, 
shut  stands  the  door."     Love  he  can  understand,  but  not  this 


312  THE  VICTORIAN   AGE 

love,  this  human  hunger  for  the  unseen  and  the  infinite,  and  in 
pathetic  bewilderment  he  takes  his  children  back  with  him, 
singing, 

"There  dwells  a  loved  one, 
But  cruel  is  she! 
She  left  lonely  forever 
The  kings  of  the  sea." 

In  the  combination  of  melody,  dramatic  sympathy,  and  poetic 
imagination,  Arnold  never  went  further  than  this. 

Several  other  poems  should  be  mentioned  in  this  connection. 
One  is  his  exceptionally  fine  sonnet  on  Shakespeare.  Another  is 
Requiescat,  a  dirge  in  four  simple,  effortless  quatrains,  which 
belongs  in  that  choice  anthology  of  perfect  little  lyrics  where 
Landor's  Rose  Aylmer  and  Tennyson's  Break,  Break,  Break 
hold  each  a  place.  Still  others,  to  pass  over  a  dozen  almost 
equally  meritorious — Isolation,  for  instance — are  the  two  com- 
plementary poems  of  The  Scholar-Gipsy  and  Thyrsis.  Both 
of  these  are  pastoral  in  character,  written  in  rather  long,  intri- 
cately rhymed,  ode-like  stanzas,  and  owe  their  peculiar  charm 
to  a  rare  combination  of  the  classical  atmosphere  with  thoroughly 
English  local  color  and  modern  feeling.  The  second  is  an  elegy 
in  memory  of  Arnold's  friend,  the  poet  Arthur  Hugh  Clough, 
and  as  such  may  not  undeservedly  be  compared  with  Milton's 
Lycidas  and  Shelley's  Adonais. 

In  contrast  with  these  lyrical  poems  are  several  experiments 

which  Arnold  made  in  the  composition  of  fragmentary  epics 

after  the  stately  and  severely  simple  style  of  Homer. 

„  ,  ,,  In  Sohrab  and  Rustum  he  reproduced  an  episode 
Kustum.  ,  ^  f 

from  the  Persian  Shah  Nameh,  or  "  Book  of  Kings;" 
Balder  Dead  is  taken  from  Norse  mythology.  There  can 
scarcely  be  any  question  that  in  the  former,  notwithstanding 
the  hazardous  nature  of  the  undertaking,  Arnold  produced  a 
great,  possibly  his  greatest,  poem.  The  subject  is  one  fraught 
with  high  poetic  possibility,  namely,  the  tie  of  affection 
between  man  and  man,  in  this  case  between  father  and  son. 


ARNOLD  313 

There  is  hardly  any  adornment  beyond  an  occasional  formal 
simile  in  the  classical  mode.  The  blank  verse  moves,  in  a 
dignified  manner  indeed,  but  at  times  almost  haltingly.  But 
from  this  very  plainness  the  tragic  tale  gathers  majesty  and 
strength;  and  insensible  must  be  the  reader  who  does  not  feel  at 
the  end,  as  Rustum  is  left  sitting  by  the  body  of  his  dead  son, 
that  this  is  such  poetry  as  purges  the  passions. 

"And  night  came  down  over  the  solemn  waste, 
And  the  two  gazing  hosts,  and  that  sole  pair, 
And  darken'd  all;  and  a  cold  fog,  with  night 
Crept  from  the  Oxus.     Soon  a  hum  arose. 
As  of  a  great  assembly  loosed,  and  fires 
Began  to  twinkle  through  the  fog;  for  now 
Both  armies  moved  to  camp,  and  took  their  meal; 
The  Persians  took  it  on  the  open  sands 
Southward,  the  Tartars  by  the  river  marge; 
And  Rustum  and  his  son  were  left  alone." 

Then,  as  the  tranquil  conclusion  goes  on  and  in  a  few  simple 
lines  translates  the  almost  intolerable  individual  tragedy  into  a 
symbol  of  universal  significance,  the  tears  that  threatened  sub- 
side again  as  insensibly  as  they  rose. 

While  one  is  disposed  to  look  among  the  foregoing  poems 

for  Arnold's  greatest  and  enduring  work,  the  special  thing  that 

distinguishes   him   among   his   contemporaries   and 

t>  '^ff  l;^^  shows  the  particular  relation  in  which  he  stood  to 
Poet;  Relig-  ^  .         i       tt- 

ious  Unrest.  *"^  ^8^  "^^  "^^  J^^  "^^"  mentioned.  His  own 
advent  at  Oxford  was  a  little  later  than  that  Trac- 
tarian  Movement  toward  High  Church  principles  which  so 
stirred  the  religious  and  intellectual  life  there  in  the  later  thirties. 
But  he  felt,  as  those  who  were  active  in  that 'movement  did,  the 
severe  shock  which  Christian  faith  was  experiencing  from  the 
assaults  of  both  philosophy  and  science.  For  himself  he  never 
espoused  either  side  very  openly,  and  it  is  not  possible  to  deter- 
mine just  what  were  his  inmost  beliefs.  But  it  is  pretty  clear 
that  he  shared,  intellectually,  in  the  rationalism  of  the  more 


314  THE  VICTORIAN   AGE 

liberal  thinkers,  while  his  heart  still  yearned  for  the  unques- 
tioning faith  of  an  earlier  day.     Thus  he  found  himself 

"Wandering  between  two  worlds,  one  dead. 
The  other  powerless  to  be  born." 

Much  of  this  unrest  was  voiced  in  his  early  poetry,  wherein  are 
constantly  recurrent  notes  of  "the  .•'omething  that  infects  the 
world,"  and  distressed  outcries  against 

"this  strange  disease  of  modern  'ife 
With  its  sick  hurry,  its  divided  aims." 

He  looked,  for  an  ideal,  back  to  the  Greek  Sophocles,  "who 
saw  life  steadily  and  saw  it  whole,"  or  to  Goethe,  "Europe's 
sagest  head."  Or  he  turned  to  the  reflective  Wordsworth,  his 
special  idol  and  guide,  who  had  more  influence  than  any  other 
upon  his  life  and  work.  But  critic  though  he  was,  he  lacked 
Goethe's  clearness  of  sight  and  Wordsworth's  absolute  faith. 
He  could  only  take  refuge  in  resignation  and  a  kind  of  Stoic 
calm.  The  most  that  Nature  could  teach  him  was  "to  bear 
rather  than  rejoice."  At  the  same  time,  he  is  to  be  given 
credit  for  an  unshaken  resolution  to  accept  life  even  on  the 
barest  terms  which  reason  will  allow,  and,  in  spite  of  all  doubt 
or  despondency,  to  make  it  moral. 

"We  cannot  kindle  when  we  will 
The  fire  which  in  the  heart  resides 
The  spirit  bloweth  and  is  still, 
In  mystery  our  soul  abides. 
But  tasks  in  hours  of  insight  will'd 
Can  be  through  hours  of  gloom  fulfill'd." 

In  such  poems,  then,  as  this  poem  of  Morality,  in  Self-Depend- 
ence,  in  The  Future,  while  we  find  Arnold  the  voice  of  perhaps 
the  least  hopeful  part  of  his  generation — an  inevitable  product, 
it  would  seem,  of  an  age  of  transition  in  thought  and  belief — we 
find  him  at  the  same  time  a  voice  of  no  little  moral  strength  and 
encouragement,  confident  in  his  declaration  of  the  abiding 
value  of  duty  and  right  conduct.     Abandoning  the  message  of 


CLOUGH  315 

his  poetry  and  recurring  to  the  Hterary  point  of  view,  one 
notes  that  however  austere  may  be  his  Muse,  however  sternly 
reflective  and  ethical  his  verse,  it  is  always,  like  his  own  re- 
ligio-moral  spirit,  "touched  with  emotion,"  and  touched  so 
genuinely  and  deeply  that  there  is  never  any  question  of  its 
right  to  be  called  poetry.  He  breathes  always  in  the  rarefied 
atmosphere  of  the  Olympian  summits. 

Only  one  other  poet  of  the  middle  years  of  the  century 
can  possibly  bear  mention  with  the  high  names  that  have  thus 

far  engaged  our  attention,  and  that  is  Arthur 
Arthur  Hugh  Clough,  an  intimate  friend  of  Arnold.    Clough 

p.      ,  was  a  pupil  at  Rugby;  and  going  from  there  to 

1S19-18G1.    Oxford  somewhat  earlier  than  Arnold,  he  came  into 

more  direct  contact  with  the  religious  ferment  of 
the  place  and  time,  with  the  result  that  his  whole  intellectual 
activity  became  engrossed  in  the  problem  of  adjusting  life  to 
the  new  conditions  of  thought  and  belief.  His  poems  belong 
mostly  to  the  period  between  1848  (a  few  were  written  before 
then)  and  his  death  in  Florence  thirteen  years  later.  His 
general  attitude  was  much  the  same  as  Arnold's,  but  more 
curiously  inquiring,  or  sceptical,  if  one  prefer  that  term,  and  he 
was  rather  less  disposed  to  trust  the  motions  of  the  spirit  that 
"bloweth  and  is  still." 

"But  play  no  tricks  upon  thy  soul,  O  man; 
Let  fact  be  fact,  and  life  the  thing  it  can." 

Dipsychus,  in  which  these  lines  occur,  is  an  unfinished  life- 
drama.  The  Bothie  of  Tober-na-Vuolich  is  a  "vacation  pas- 
toral" in  dactylic  hexameters  that  quite  fail  of  the  smoothness 
of  their  model,  TiOngfellow's  Evangeline.  Amours  de  Voyage 
is  a  story  in  the  form  of  rhymed  epistles.  All  attack  in  one  way 
or  another  the  problem  of  social  and  individual  life  under  the 
actual  conditions  with  which  Clough  and  his  generation  were 
surrounded.  Better  poetry  on  the  whole  is  to  be  found  in  a  few 
of  his  shorter  poems  such  as  Qtia  Vursum  Ventus,  Qui  Laborat 


316  THE  VICTORIAN   AGE 

Oral,  Say  not  the  Struggle  Naught  Availeth,  and  lie  Domum 
SaturcE,  Venit  Hesperus.  The  last  named,  a  simple  little 
Country  idyl,  happily  <onceived  and  delicately  phrased  and 
modulated,  might  well,  under  a  more  felicitous  title,  attain  to 
the  rank  of  a  minor  classic.  But  in  general,  between  the 
formal  deficiencies  of  his  more  substantive  poems,  and  the 
reflective  cast  of  the  more  lyrical  trifles,  Clough  has  not  found 
the  acceptance  which  was  so  freely  prophesied  for  him.  Liter- 
ary history  may  remember  him  for  his  faithful  expression  of 
certain  marked  tendencies  of  the  middle  decade  of  the  century 
when  he  wrote,  but  Arnold  has  given  an  equally  faithful  ex- 
pression and  a  much  more  consistently  poetic  one;  and  it  is  in 
Arnold's  Thyrsis  that  Clough  himself  is  likely  to  find  his 
securest  fame. 


CHAPTER  XIX 

THE    VICTORIAN    NOVEL 

DICKENS     THACKERAY     CHARLOTTE  BRONTE     GEORGE  ELIOT 

Two  tendencies,  sometimes  mingling  in  the  work  of  one  and 
the  same  novehst,  marked  the  fiction  of  the  Victorian  age.  The 
first  was  due  to  the  Ungering  influence  of  Scott,  through  whom  a 
tinge  of  romanticism  was  imparted  to  much  of  the  fiction  which 
succeeded;  the  model,  moreover,  of  Scott's  historical  novels  con- 
tinued to  exercise  a  strong  fascination.  On  the  other  hand, 
there  was  a  much  stronger  tendency  to  revert  to  the  methods  of 
the  eighteenth-century  realists.  Jane  Austen  has  already 
been  noted  as  maintaining  the  methods  of  those  realists  quite 
up  to  the  time  of  Scott's  earliest  triumphs,  and  a  very  few  years 
after  his  death  the  same  methods,  never  entirely  neglected, 
became  again  the  controlling  ones.  The  chief  difference  is 
to  be  sought  in  the  broadened  scope  of  the  later  novel,  which 
is  largely  due  to  the  new  and  more  complicated  social  conditions 
under  which  it  was  produced.  Some  of  these  conditions  have 
been  set  forth  in  the  preceding  chapter  on  poetry;  others 
will  be  discovered  in  connection  with  the  discussion  of  the  par- 
ticular novelists  and  novels  to  follow. 

Mention  of  two  names  may  serve  to  bridge  the  slight  gap  in 
years  between  the  later  Waverley  Novels  and  the  first  of  the 
..  Sketches  by  "  Boz."  These  are  Benjamin  Disraeli, 
180A-1881  I-'Ord  Beac-onsfield,  and  Edward  Bulwcr,  the  first  Lord 
Bulwer-  Lytton.  Both  began  writing,  like  the  poets  of  the 
Lytton,  time,  under  the  all-powerful  influence  of  Lord  Byron's 

1803-1813.  popularity,  producing  thrilling  "  fasiiionablc"  stories 
of  high-born  heroes,  who  were  cynical,  it  might  be,  or  worldly, 
to  the  last  degree.     Disraeli  even  put  the  story  of  Byron's  own 

317 


318         .  THE   VICTORIAN   NOVEL 

life  into  his  Venetia  (1837).  But  with  all  its  romantic  color  their 
fiction  was  mainly  social,  and  the  word  "novel"  is  in  general  the 
better  name  for  it.  The  two  writers  were  much  alike  in 
versatility,  cleverness,  extravagance  of  sentiment  and  style, 
and  a  showy  but  somewhat  insincere  philosophy.  The  first 
of  Disraeli's  dozen  novels,  Vivian  Grey,  was  published  in 
1826.  On  the  strength  of  a  quickly  won  popularity  he  was  a 
great  literary  lion  in  London  in  the  early  thirties.  The  middle 
and  later  parts  of  his  life,  during  which  he  was  a  leader  in  the 
House  of  Commons  and  several  times  Prime  Minister,  were  spent 
in  politics;  and  his  three  best  works  are  political  novels  of  his 
middle  period — Coningshy  (1844),  Sybil  (1845),  and  Tancred 
(1847).  Bulwer-Lytton  also  was  a  politician  and  member  of 
Parliament,  and  he  maintained  a  still  wider  and  more  endur- 
ing popularity,  dazzling  the  reading  public  with  his  kaleidoscopic 
novel-romances  as  he  dazzled  British  society  with  his  finger- 
rings  and  shirt -frills  and  "looking-glass  boots."  Falkland 
appeared  m  1827,  Pelham  in  1828.  The  list  that  followed  is 
longer  than  that  of  any  other  British  novelist  equally  famous, 
and  he  also  wrote  some  poems,  and  several  very  successful 
plays — The  Lady  of  Lyons  (1838),  for  instance,  and  Richelieu 
(1839).  The  novels  are  of  almost  every  variety.  There  are 
even  several  romances  of  "Gothic"  mystery  and  terror,  like 
Zanoni  (1842)  and  A  Strange  Story  (1862).  There  are  novels  of 
sentiment,  or  rather  of  sentimentalism,  Lytton's  best  work  in 
this  kind  being  Eugene  Aram  (1832)  and  Ernest  Maltravers 
(1837).  There  are  historical  romances  too,  among  which  The 
Last  Days  of  Pompeii  (1834),  still  almost  universally  known,  is 
apparently  his  most  vital  work.  The  Last  of  the  Barons  (1843) 
and  Harold  (1848)  deal  with  English  history,  the  former  with 
that  critical  period  in  the  Wars  of  the  Roses  when  the  downfall 
of  Warwick  and  the  downfall  of  feudalism  went  hand  in  hand. 
All  these  works  are  in  some  measure  romances;  but  after  the 
vogue  of  purely  realistic  fiction  was  revived  by  his  junior  con- 
temporaries, Lytton  turned  to  that  and  produced  with  equal  ease 


DICKENS  319 

and  success  The  Caxtons  (1849)  and  My  Novel  (1853).  It 
would  be  idle  to  deny  that  genius  of  a  very  unusual  sort  went 
to  the  production  of  such  a  bulk  and  variety  of  interesting  and 
to  some  extent  instructive  work.  At  the  same  time,  it  is  certain 
that  Lytton  lacked  the  higher  qualities  of  genius,  while  his 
showy  cleverness  and  a  certain  hollowness  and  superficial  gran- 
diloquence may  be  ranked  as  positive  faults.  It  is  not  likely 
therefore  that  he  will  ever  again  be  ranked  with  the  really 
great  creators  of  Victorian  fiction. 

Among  those  great  creators  the  first  two  in  the  order  of 
time,  and  probably  in  nearly  every  order  of  merit  are  Charles 
Dickens  and  William  ^Makepeace  Thackeray.  Dick- 
Lnarles  ens's  life  began  in  unpromising  obscurity,  on  an  island 
1812-1R70  °^  ^^  south  coast  where  his  father  was  a  poor  gov- 
ernment clerk.  The  family  moved  to  Chatham, 
and  thence  to  London,  when  Charles  was  nine  years  of  age. 
The  father  was  almost  continually  in  debt  and  the  boy  became 
early  familiar  with  the  inner  workings  of  debtors'  prisons  as 
well  as  with  pawnshops  and  various  unpleasant  processes  of 
law.  His  first  emplojTnent  was  as  wTapper  of  parcels  in  a 
blacking  warehouse,  a  fact  about  which,  through  most  of  his  life, 
somewhat  unworthily  he  kept  a  sharped  silence.  Then  he 
contrived  to  get  a  little  schooling,  learned  shorthand,  and 
worked  his  way  to  a  position  as  reporter  for  the  Morning  Chron- 
icle. The  work  was  hard — Dickens  always  worked  hard — but 
the  knowledge  of  life  and  human  nature  which  he  obtained 
reporting  debates  in  the  House  of  Commons,  riding  over  the 
country  in  all  weathers  to  report  election  speeches,  prowling 
about  London  on  all  sorts  of  "Retails,"  proved  invaluable  in 
his  later  career.  His  powers  of  observation  were  extraordi- 
narily keen,  and  he  naturally  turned  them  to  account  in  his 
first  literary  writing.  Sketches  by  Boz  were  descriptive  and 
humorous  papers  contributed  to  the  journals  and  reprinted 
in  two  volumes  in  1835  and  1836.  In  the  latter  year  he 
began   some    sketches,    intended    to    accompany    a    series  of; 


320  THE   VICTORIAN   NOVEL 

sporting  plates  by  a  caricaturist,  which  rapidly  developed  into 
the  Pickwick  Papers  that  made  his  fame.  Once  Mr.  Pickwick 
and  his  Club  and  the  merry,  impudent,  irresistible  Sam  Weller 
had  established  themselves  in  town,  Dickens  ceased  to  report 
for  the  newspapers  and  began  to  report  for  the  wider  public  out 
of  his  own  creative  imagination.  It  is  not  necessary  to  name 
the  score  or  more  of  long  novels  and  shorter  stories  that  flowed 
from  his  fertile  pen.  Everybody  read  them  and  laughed  and 
cried  over  them,  and  the  poor  reporter  rose  to  the  splendor  of 
colored  velvet  waistcoats  and  the  dignity  of  some  intimacy 
with  the  London  artistic  and  fashionable  world.  While  still 
under  thirty  he  was  by  far  the  most  popular  writer  of  his  day. 
He  travelled  to  Edinburgh,  Italy,  and  America.  For  America 
he  conceived  a  strong  dislike,  ^which  he  did  not  hesitate  to 
express  (see  his  American  Notes,  1842);  but  he  returned 
thither  again  in  1867  and  gave  public  readings  from  his  works, 
as  he  had  done  at  home — with  extraordinary  success,  too,  for 
he  had  a  genuine  actor's  talent.  In  1856  he  purchased  Gad's 
Hill  Place,  in  Kent,  realizing  thus  a  dream  of  his  poverty- 
stricken  boyhood,  and  there  in  June,  1870,  he  suddenly  died, 
of  overwork  and  nervous  exhaustion.  He  was  buried  in  West- 
minster Abbey. 

Fiction  of  the  popular,  human  sort  like  that  of  Dickens 
does  not  lend  itself  to  the  same  kind  of  criticism  as  do  the  crea- 
tions of  a  colder  art.     For  those  who  do  not  know, 

as  for  those  who  do,  the  characters  of  Paul  Dombey, 
itarian  r^  •  •  •     /-^ 

Novelist.       Oliver  Twist,  David  Copperfield,  Peggotty,  Agnes, 

Dora,  Little  Nell,  the  ever  interesting  Micawber 
and  Dick  Swiveller,  the  disreputable  Sairey  Gamp,  the  ruffianly 
Bill  Sikes,  the  hj'pocritical  Pecksniff,  description  avails  but 
little.  Their  acquaintance  must  be  made  in  the  novels  them- 
selves, and  when  these  have  been  read  and  enjoyed  the  novelist's 
primary  purpose  has  been  served.  Yet  a  few  of  the  books  call 
for  special  comment,  and  a  further  summary  of  the  writer's 
methods  and  tendencies  will  serve  to  set  his  work  in  a  clearer 


DICKENS 


321 


light.  For  to  say  that  Dickens's  purpose  was  to  entertain  the 
public,  i§  not  to  tell  quite  the  whole  of  the  tale.  While  the 
Pickioick  Papers  were  making  all  London  laugh,  Dickens 
began  his  first  long,  coherent  novel,  Oliver  Tvnst,  and  he 
deliberately  made  it  as  tragic  as  those  papers  were  comic.  The 
novel  was  written,  as  he  afterward  avowed,  with  the  serious 
purpose  of  showing  forth  poverty  and  vice  as  they  really  were. 


OLD  OURIOSITy  SHOP.' 


without  any  trappings  of  gaudy  romance.  He  would  not  "  abate 
one  hole  in  the  Dodger's  coat  nor  one  scrap  of  curl-paper  in  the 
girl's  dishevelled  hair."  In  this  spirit  therefore  he  portrayed  (not 
without  some  satire  upon  the  Poor  Laws)  the  nefariously  man- 
aged workhouse  in  which  Oliver  was  born  and  so  wofuUy  under- 
fed, and  the  "foul  and  frowsy  "dens  of  thievery  and  vice  into  which 
fate  later  led  the  poor  waif,  in  the  conviction  that  to  reveal 
these  things  thus,  however  depressing  the  sordid  revelation  might 
be,  was  to  do  a  service  to  society.  No  doubt  it  was,  though  it  is 
difficult  to  estimate  the  precise  amount  of  service  done.     It  was 


322  THE  VICTORIAN   NOVEL 

at  least  good  to  counteract  the  effect  of  such  sentimental  crimi- 
nal novels  as  Lytton's  Eugene  Aram.  Dickens  made  several  at- 
tempts of  this  kind.  In  Nicholas  Nickleby,  Mr.  Squeers's  noto- 
rious Dotheboys  Hall  is  a  manifest  satire  upon  private  schools 
conducted  solely  for  private  gain;  while  in  Bhak  House,  the 
needless  prolonging  of  suits  in  Chancery  comes  in  for  exposure. 
Old  Curiosity  Shop  and  Little  Dorrit,  the  latter  with  its  scenes  in 
a  debtor's  prison,  may  be  placed  in  a  similar  category.  Taken 
together,  they  illustrate  what  may  be  called  the  humanitarian 
novel,  a  distinct  development  of  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  in  which  a  sentimentalist  like  Dickens  was  eminently 
fitted  to  lead,  with  Reade  and  Kingsley  as  good  seconds. 

Twice  Dickens  tried  the  historical  novel,  in  Bamaby  Rudge 
and  A  Tale  of  Two  Cities.  The  latter  is  a  highly  dramatic  story 
of  the  French  Revolution,  reminding  one  in  its  terrible  vividness 
of  Carlyle's  graphic  pictures  of  the  same  deluge  of  blood.  He  also 
wrote  novels  with  an  ethical  purpose;  Martin  Chuzzlewit  might 
be  singled  out  as  a  kind  of  sermon  upon  selfishness,  Dombey  and 
Son  as  one  upon  pride,  and  the  Christmas  Books  as  one  upon  char- 
ity. But  it  is  scarcely  wise  to  study  these  in  this  light,  nor  should 
it  be  supposed  that  their  value  is  determined  by  such  considera- 
tions. If  we  go  back  at  once  to  the  fundamental  qualities  of 
the  novels  as  such,  their  power  to  please  and  to  move,  we  should 
probably  decide  that  Dickens's  greatest  works  are,  for  the  un- 
critical reader,  Dombey  and  Son,  for  the  critical,  Martin  Chuz- 
zleivit  and  Great  Expectations,  and  for  both,  the  Pickwick 
Papers  (though  they  are  scarcely  a  novel),  A  Tale  of  Two  Cities, 
and  David  Copperfield.  The  last,  we  know  now,  is  really  the 
disguised  story  of  Dickens's  own  life,  and  therein  lies  the  secret 
of  its  greatness.  "No  one  can  ever  believe  this  Narrative,  in 
the  reading,"  he  declared,  "more  than  I  have  believed  it  in  the 
writing;"  and,  "Of  all  my  books  I  like  this  the  best."  Thus 
we  can  understand  how  it  should  be  so  truthful  and  convincing, 
so  harmonious  in  tone,  so  full  of  memorable  scenes  and  lovable 
characters,  above  all  so  sympathetic  in  its  delineations  of  what 


--•'  DICKENS  323 

always  engaged  Dickens's  closest  interest,  the  joys  and  sorrows 
of  childhood. 

It  is  easy  to  name  the  qualities  of  Dickens's  genius,  so  salient 
are  they  and  so  omnipresent.  A  wonderful  vigor,  a  faculty  for 
graphic  description  which  runs  parallel  with  his  minute  observa- 
tion, sympathies  that  are  always  tenderly  alive,  a  keen  sense  of 
humor,  a  keen  sense  of  pathos,  a  fertile  imagination,  and  a 
facile  style, — thus,  perhaps,  we  may  sum  them  up.  It  is  like- 
wise easy  to  point  out  his  faults,  since  they  are  chiefly  the  de- 
fects of  his  qualities.  He  grows  tedious  to  a  reader  who  is  more 
easily  wearied  than  himself;  his  humor  is  sometimes  too  broadly 
comic;  his  pathos  is  often  sentimentally  overcharged;  his  imagi- 
nation knows  no  bounds.  The  tendency  to  that  sentimentality 
which  is  constantly  shedding  tears  of  joy  and  which  loves  to 
linger  over  deathbed  scenes  was  a  tendency  of  the  time,  but 
that  is  riot  much  excuse  for  a  writer  who  so  manifestly  encour- 
aged the  tendency  as  Dickens  did.  This  weakness,  however, 
affects  only  particular  scenes.  A  more  radical  defect  is  the 
exaggeration  and  distortion  which  mark  nearly  everything  that 
came  from  his  hands.  It  is  the  riotous  imagination  that  will 
not  be  curbed.  Watch  it  in  its  most  trivial  working.  When  our 
attention  is  called  to  the  exceedingly  animated  and  alert  character 
of  Mr.  William  Swidger,  we  are  told  that  his  "very  trousers 
hitched  themselves  up  at  the  ankles."  Peggotty's  cheeks  and 
arms  are  so  hard  and  red,  says  David Copperfield,  that  "I  won- 
dered why  the  birds  didn't  peck  her  in  preference  to  apples," 
and  her  rough  forefinger  "I  once  associated  with  a  pocket 
nutmeg-grater."  It  is  this  practice  that  seems  to  label  almost 
every  creation  of  Dickens  with  the  legend  "Grotesque" — that 
makes  us  say  of  his  characters  that  they  are  mainly  caricatures, 
and  of  his  scenes  that  they  are  realistic  but  never  quite  real. 
He  presents  to  us  Truth  in  the  mask  of  Harlequin.  It  is  not 
probable  that  Dickens  ever  could  have  learned  to  draw  character 
subtly.  He  did  not  deal  with  subtle  characters,  but  kept  mainly 
to  that  humble  life  that  does  not  tend  to  cultivate  refinements 


324  THE   VICTORIAN   NOVEL 

of  distinction.  Moreover,  his  method  is  the  very  obvious  one  of 
fixing  upon  a  pecuUarity  and  making  tlie  most  of  it.  The  pecu- 
liarity may  be  a  mere  trick  of  speech;  it  may  be  something  that 
can  be  suggested  in  the  character's  name;  but  whatever  it  is,  the 
character  advertises  the  reader  of  it  promptly  and  persistently. 
Uriah  Heep  is  always  professing  his  humbleness,  Micawber 
always  waiting  for  something  to  turn  up,  while  Pecksniff  mani- 
fests in  every  word  and  deed  his  ingrained  hypocrisy.  It  is 
much  the  same  thing,  though  with  more  of  human  reality,  that 
Ben  Jonson  and  his  tribe  put  on  the  stage  as  "humours." 

Yet  it  is  very  certain  that  the  world  of  Dickens  would  not 
be  quite  the  delightful  world  it  is  if  these  admitted  blemishes 
were  away.  They  seem  indeed  to  be  root  and  trunk  of  the 
man's  genius,  not  branches  that  will  bear  lopping.  The  same 
thing  is  true  of  the  mannerisms  of  his  style  and  particularly 
the  mannerism  of  unlimited  repetition,  which,  like  the  rest, 
springs  almost  inevitably  from  the  exuberance  of  his  imagination. 
Always,  indeed,  we  come  back  to  this;  and  shall  we  not  say  that 
his  abounding  humanity  and  his  exhaustless  imagination  are  the 
two  gifts  which  made  Dickens  at  once  beloved  and  great? 
They  are  easy  to  illustrate,  since  almost  every  page  tingles  with 
the  overflowing  vitality  of  the  man.  Take  first,  for  humanity, 
this  homely  picture  from  A  Christmas  Carol: 

"You  never  in  all  your  life  saw  anything  like  Trotty  after  this. 
I  don't  care  where  you  have  lived  or  what  you  have  seen;  you  never 
in  all  your  life  saw  anything  at  all  approaching  him!  He  sat  down 
in  his  chair  and  beat  his  knees  and  cried;  he  sat  down  in  his  chair 
and  beat  his  knees  and  laughed;  he  sat  down  in  his  chair  and  beat 
his  knees  and  laughed  and  cried  together;  he  got  out  of  his  chair 
and  hugged  Meg;  he  got  out  of  his  chair  and  hugged  Richard;  he  got 
out  of  his  chair  and  hugged  them  both  at  once;  he  kept  running  up 
to  Meg,  and  squeezing  her  fresh  face  between  his  hands  and  kissing 
it,  going  from  her  backwards  not  to  lose  sight  of  it,  and  running 
up  again  like  a  figure  in  a  magic  lantern;  and  whatever  he  did,  he 
was  constantly  sitting  himself  down  in  his  chair,  and  never  stopping 
in  it  for  one  single  moment;  being — that's  the  truth — beside  himself 
with  joy." 


THACKERAY  325 

Then  take,  for  imagination,  this  from  A   Tale  of  Two  Cities: 

"It  was  a  heavy  mass  of  building,  that  chateau  of  Monsieur  the 
Marquis,  with  a  large  stone  court-yard  before  it,  and  two  stone 
sweeps  of  staircase  meeting  in  a  stone  terrace  before  the  principal 
door.  A  stony  business  altogether,  with  heavy  stone  balustrades, 
and  stone  urns,  and  stone  flowers,  and  stone  faces  of  men,  and  stone 
heads  of  hons,  in  all  directions.  As  if  the  Gorgon's  head  had  surveyed 
it,  when  it  was  finished,  two  centuries  ago." 

How  the  stony  indifference  to  suffering  into  which  the  aristocracy 
of  Europe  had  hardened  has  crept  into  the  simple  reaHsm  of 
this  description,  giving  it  a  touch  even  of  moral  grandeur!  Read 
also  in  the  same  tale  such  chapters  as  "Echoing  Footsteps," 
"The  Sea  Still  Rises,"  "Fire  Rises," — read  them  aloud  and 
rapidly  to  catch  the  full  rhythm  of  the  sentences  with  their 
stress  of  feeling  beneath,  and  admire  the  extent  of  the  author's 
rhetorical  power.  It  is  these  powers  of  sympathy,  imagination, 
and  style,  present  to  a  greater  or  less  degree  in  a  thousand 
chapters  and  passages,  that  give  to  Dickens's  genius  a  char- 
acter for  which  height  or  depth  may  not  often  be  the  word, 
but  breadth  invariably  is.  People  cross  his  pages  in  families, 
in  schools,  in  mobs,  each  with  some  individuality  of  his  own; 
and  into  the  creation  of  each  has  gone  the  author's  love  or  pity 
with  a  spirit  that  is  childlike  in  its  abandonment.  If  there  was  a 
limit  to  the  freshness  and  fertility  of  his  creative  powers,  the  pen 
at  work  upon  Edvrin  Drood  dropped  from  his  hand  in  the 
Swiss  chalet  at  Gad's  Hill  without  having  given  any  sign  of  it. 
William  ]Makepeace  Thackeray,  now  Dickens's  yoke-fellow 
in  literary  history,  sustained  toward  him  and  his  work  a 
relation  similar  in  several   respects   to   that  which 

William        Browning   held  toward  Tennyson.     He  was    later 

Makepeace    ^,         t^-  i  •  •         x      /  i    i  • 

„,     ^  than  Dickens  m  commg   to  tame,   and   his  popu- 

1811-1863.    larity  never  spread  so  widely  among  all  classes, 

perhaps  scarcely  reaching  the  humbler  classes  at  all. 

At  the  same  time  he  possessed  a  certain  depth  and  solidity  of 

genius  which  Dickens  did  not.     He  was  born  at  Calcutta,  India, 


326  THE  VICTORIAN  NOVEL 

where  his  father  was  in  the  Civil  Service.  Upon  his  father's 
death,  he  was  taken,  at  the  age  of  five,  to  England.  He  was 
sent  to  Charterhouse  School  (the  "Grey  Friars"  of  The  New- 
comes),  and  proceeded  thence  to  Trinity  College,  Cambridge 
(the  "Oxbridge"  of  Pendennis)  in  the  year  in  which  Tennyson 
won  the  Chancellor's  medal  with  the  poem,  Timhuctoo.  Thack- 
eray, it  is  remembered,  wrote  a  burlesque  poem  upon  the 
same  subject.  He  had  a  real  talent  for  poetry  which  later 
yielded  so  excellent  a  medley  of  sentiment  and  pathos  as  the 
Ballad  of  Bouillabaisse.  He  left  Cambridge  without  taking 
a  degree,  and  sought  a  more  worldly  education  in  travel  on  the 
continent.  When,  at  twenty-one,  he  came  into  his  fortune,  he 
embarked  it  in  several  disastrous  enterprises,  one  of  which  was 
newspapers  and  another  gaming,  and  he  speedily  found  himself 
face  to  face  with  the  wolf.  Having  a  little  skill  at  drawing  he 
went  to  Paris  with  the  idea  of  becoming  a  professional  artist, 
but  became  a  professional  newspaper  correspondent  instead. 
His  marriage  proved  another  misfortune,  for  his  wife's  mind 
failing,  he  was  obliged  to  part  from  her.  He  naturally  turned 
for  solace  to  the  Club-world  of  London,  and  there  he  came  to 
be  a  familiar  figure,  a  Bohemian,  one  may  say,  of  the  very  best 
type. 

All  this  time,  with  Dickens  in  the  full  tide  of  success, 
Thackeray  was  only  a  struggling  "contributor"  to  Fraser's  and 
Punch,  writing  various  sketches,  such  as  The  Yellowplush 
Papers  (1837),  over  an  assumed  name.  Even  the  tale  of  Barry 
Lyndon  (1844),  the  lively  autobiography  of  an  Irish  rogue, 
failed  to  attract  attention  toward  him.  But  in  1848,  when  he 
was  well  past  thirty-five,  appeared  the  Book  of  Snobs  and  the 
great  novel  of  Vanity  Fair,  and  Dickens's  rival  was  fairly  in  the 
field.  The  renown  which  was  scarcely  hoped  for,  certainly 
little  expected,  came,  and  fortune  with  it.  The  other  novels 
followed  almost  as  a  matter  of  course — Pendennis  (1849-50), 
Henry  Esmond  (1852),  The  Newcomes  (1854-55),  and  The 
Virginians  (1858-59).     In  1851  he  went  upon  the  public  lecture 


THACKERAY  327 

platform.  This  was  before  Dickens  began  his  readings;  and 
he  anticipated  Dickens  also  in  repeating  his  success — for  he 
was  highly  successful — in  the  United  States.  The  subjects  of 
his  lectures  were  The  English  Humourists  of  the  Eighteenth 
Century  and  The  Four  Georges,  published  respectively  in  1853 
and  1861.  In  1860  he  assunied  the  editorship  of  the  newly 
launched  Comhill  Magazine,  but  did  not  retain  it  long.  He 
died  suddenly  on  Christmas  Eve,  1863,  leaving  as  Dickens  did 
seven  years  later,  an  unfinished  novel. 

Of  Thackeray's  five  long  novels,  the  last  written  is  of  the 
least  importance,  though  it  maintains  a  place  of  interest  as  a 

sequel  to  Esmond.  The  Newcomes,  too,  though 
The  Novels,  sometimes  regarded  as  the  very  greatest  among  novels 

of  manners,  probably  has  its  surest  hold  on  the  affec- 
tions through  one  character,  the  noble,  lovable,  and  one  may 
trust,  immortal  Colonel  Newcome.  In  the  creation  of  character, 
inde«  %  Thackeray  has  no  equal  among  English  novelists;  he 
is  r  i,med  with  Balzac  and  Shakespeare.  But  there  are  other 
things  besides  the  creation  of  character  to  support  his  three 
greatest  books.  Vanity  Fair,  so  significantly  named,  is  a  mas- 
terpiece of  satire  and  realism.  As  such  it  abjures  heroics; 
Waterloo,  Wellington,  and  "Bonaparty"  appear  for  a  time  in 
the  background,  but  too  dimly  to  make  an  exception.  It  is  an 
unvarnished  story  of  life  in  the  sordid  upper  middle-class  world, 
with  the  scheming,  unprincipled  Becky  Sharp  for  unheroic  pro- 
tagonist. Very  naturally,  the  book  was  not  regarded  as  edifying, 
though  it  was  an  excellent  antidote  for  a  good  deal  of  current 
Bulwerism.  Pendennis  is  also  a  novel  without  a  hero  other 
than  the  bad-and-good  Pen  himself.  Though  not  greater 
than  Vanity  Fair,  it  is  quite  as  good  in  its  way,  for 
Thackeray  put  into  it  much  of  his  own  life  and  character,  a 
fact  which  carried  a  certain  warranty  of  truth.  Esmond,  how- 
ever, if  one  may  dare  to  choose,  is  the  great  book — in  style,  in 
harmony  of  form  and  matter,  in  subjection  of  the  satirist  and 
sermonizer  to  the  creator  and  artist,  in  characters,  in  richness  of 


328  THE  VICTORIAN   NOVEL 

historical  background,  in  almost  everything.  It  is  the  most 
realistic  of  historical  novels.  In  it,  again,  the  author  has 
dramatically  identified  himself  with  his  hero,  but  this  time 
wholly  in  imagination,  not  in  any  autobiographical  sense. 
The  scene  he  has  placed  in  the  days  of  Queen  Anne,  with 
Dick  Steele  (one  may  be  sure  it  would  be  Steele  and  not 
Addison)  as  one  of  Esmond's  friends,  and  the  great  Marlbor- 
ough of  the  continental  campaigns  as  Esmond's  unworshipful 
general.  Then,  with  an  almost  perfect  assimilation  of  the 
style  of  the  Spectator  and  in  a  delightful  compromise  between 
the  first  and  third  persons,  the  reader  is  led,  fascinated,  through 
the  story  of  Esmond's  hopeless  infatuation  and  unselfish  sacri- 
fice, and  of  his  mistress  the  Lady  Castlewood's  sadly  divided 
devotion,  and  of  Beatrix's  utter  but  not  quite  unforgivable 
hardness  of  heart.  From  first  to  last,  through  Esmond's 
boyhood  and  manhood  alike,  it  is  a  story  that  could  not  be 
better  told. 

The  qualities  of  Thackeray  are  not  so  striking  as  thos    of 
Dickens,  but  they  are  none  the  less  pervasive,  and  no  estimate 

of  his  work  is  possible  that  does  not  take  into  account 
Realist  and   ,  .  i-.         t  t^     •  i  •     ^' 

I,  .  ^     his  personality.     In  a  sense,  he  is    more   obiective 

Humanist.  ^  *  t-w      •  7    /-«  r  1 1      tr  \ 

than  the  author  of  Damd  Copperfield.     He  keeps 

at  arm's  length  the  cliaracters  that  Dickens  would  embrace; 
he  will  not  spare  even  Pendennis  or  Esmond  for  their  crying. 
Yet  he  is  forever  taking  the  reader  parenthetically  into  his 
confidence  and  evincing  for  him  a  sympathy  which  he  refuses 
to  his  creations.  It  is  thus  that  Jie  holds  the  curious  position  of 
detachment  from  his  story  proper  though  never  of  detachment 
from  his  work.  Detachment  seems  to  be  a  condition  of  the 
nighest  success  in  creative  fiction, — while  some  revelation  of 
the  creator's  personality  is  certainly  a  condition  of  winning  the 
reader's  love.  Thackeray,  more  by  ingenuousness  than  by  in- 
genuity, meets  both  conditions.  He  stands  apart  while  the 
play  goes  on,  and  shifts  the  scenes,  turning  up  the  lights  and 
turning  them  down,  and  even  comes  before  the  curtain  between 


THACKERAY  329 

acts  to  lecture.  But  never,  after  all,  was  there  a  scene-shifter 
or  proscenium  lecturer  who  watched  more  intently  the  progress 
of  the  play.  It  has  for  him  the  fascination  of  life — it  is  life — 
and  the  spectator  must  share  the  fascination  with  him. 

Yet  the  spectators  of  Thackeray's  little  dramas  at  first 
strangely  misunderstood  liim.  They  said  he  was  satirical, 
which  he  certainly  was,  and  cjmical,  which  he  was  not,  at  least 
not  as  they  thought  him,  and  misanthropic,  which  he  was  not 
at  all.  He  did  not  picture  for  them  the  extravagant  heroes, 
good  and  bad,  which  they  so  much  wanted.  He  let  men  and 
women  who  were  utterly  foolish,  frivolous,  or  vain,  move  about 
in  society,  instead  of  making  them  deep-dyed,  out-and-out  vil- 
lains, obvious  targets  for  the  moralists.  Or  he  took  people 
of  a  better  sort  and  pried  into  their  characters  until  he  found 
all  kinds  of  faults  and  weaknesses,  and  then  allowed  other 
people,  good  people  too,  to  love  them  and  marry  them.  His 
readers — the  more  discriminating,  of  course,  always  excepted— 
did  not  realize  that  he  was  simply  holding  up  the  mirror, 
showing  them  to  themselves  exactly  as  they  were.  It  is  not  cyn- 
icism to  know  that  this  is  a  mad  world,  and  to  say  it ;  it  is  simply 
wholesome  satire.  Thackeray  was  a  man  of  the  world,  with  a 
deep  knowledge,  born  of  experience,  of  what  strangely  com- 
posite creatures  we  are  who  move  through  laughter  and  tears 
to  a  common  grave.  Such  a  man  will  not  love  exactly  as  the 
unsophisticated  do,  in  maudlin  sentiment  or  foolish  hero-wor- 
ship, but  if  love  be  in  him  at  all  he  will  love  most  wisely  and 
humanly.  Such  love  was  in  Thackeray.  We  are  struck  by 
the  admirable  art  which  allows  its  best  characters  to  go  to  such 
len^Ls  of  weakness  and  folly  and  yet  saves  them  at  the  last — 
whicn  allows  the  author  himself  to  ridicule  and  rail  as  one  who 
stands  on  the  verge  of  utter  cynicism  and  misanthropy,  and 
yet  saves  himself.  But  it  is  more  than  art;  for  doubt  and  deride 
as  he  would,  Thackeray  could  only  love  after  all. 

The  evidences  of  these  things  are  at  hand.  In  the  preface 
to  Pendennis,  Thackeray  put  his  purpose  very  plainly.     "Since 


330  THE  VICTORIAN   NOVEL 

the  author  of  Tom  Jones  was  buried,  no  writer  of  fiction  among 
us  has  been  permitted  to  depict  to  his  utmost  power  a  Man. 
We  must  drape  him,  and  give  him  a  certain  conventional 
simper.  Society  will  not  tolerate  the  Natural  in  our  art." 
And  he  cast  up  to  his  readers  their  insincerity  and  ostrich-like 
self-delusion.  "You  will  not  hear — it  is  best  to  know  it — what 
moves  in  the  real  world."  He  was  resolved  they  should 
hear  it;  and  so  he  told  them  such  blunt  truths  as  that  "the 
elder  of  Esmond's  two  kinswomen  pardoned  the  younger  her 
beauty  when  that  had  lost  some  of  its  freshness,  perhaps,"  or 
that  "'tis  strange  what  a  man  may  do  and  a  woman  yet  think 
him  an  angel."  He  painted  such  terrible  pictures  as  the  old 
Baroness  Bernstein  of  The  Virginians,  the  creature  into  whom, 
with  the  inevitableness  of  fate,  time  transmuted  the  lovely, 
worldly  Beatrix  of  Esmond.  He  allowed  Esmond  himself  to 
tail  on  this  wise: 

"I  have  seen  too  much  of  success  in  life  to  take  off  my  hat  and 
huzzah  to  it  as  it  passes  in  its  gilt  coach;  and  would  do  my  little 
part  with  my  neighbours  on  foot,  that  they  should  not  gape  with  too 
much  wonder,  nor  applaud  too  loudly.  Is  it  the  Lord  Mayor  going  in 
?tate  to  mince-pies  and  the  Mansion  House?  Is  it  poor  Jack  of  New- 
gate's procession,  with  the  sheriff  and  javelin-men  conducting  him 
bn  his  last  journey  to  Tyburn?  I  look  into  my  heart  and  think  that 
I  am  as  good  as  my  Lord  Mayor,  and  know  I  am  as  bad  as  Tyburn 
lack.  Give  me  a  chain  and  red  gown  and  a  pudding  before  me,  and 
\  could  play  the  part  of  Alderman  very  well,  and  sentence  Jack  after 
iinner.  Starve  me,  keep  me  from  books  and  honest  people,  educate 
me  to  love  dice,  gin,  and  pleasure,  and  put  me  on  Hounslow  Heath, 
with  a  purse  before  me,  and  I  will  take  it.  'And  I  shall  be  deservedly 
hanged,'  say  you,  wishing  to  put  an  end  to  this  prosing.  I  don't 
say  No.  I  can't  but  accept  the  world  as  I  find  it,  including  a  rope's 
end,  as  long  as  it  is  in  fashion." 

This  may  sound  like  cynicism.  Yet  watch  again  the  better  nature 
struggling  through.  While  he  was  upon  the  composition  of  Pen- 
dennis,  Thackeray  met  a  woman  who  seemed  to  him  like  Blanche 
Amory.  "We  talked  and  persiflated  all  the  way  to  London,"  he 
wrote  to  a  friend,  "and  the  idea  of  her  will  help  me  to  a  good 


THACKERAY  331 

chapter,  in  which  I  will  make  Pendennis  and  Blanche  play  at 
being  in  love,  such  a  false  humbugging  London  love  as  two  hlase 
London  people  might  act,  and  half  deceive  themselves  that 
they  were  in  earnest.  That  will  complete  the  cycle  of  Mr.  Pen's 
worldly  experiences,  and  then  we  will  make,  or  try  and  make 
a  good  man  of  him.  O  !  me,  we  are  wicked  worldlings  most 
of  us,  may  God  better  us,  and  cleanse  us  !"  Then  read  the 
beautiful  scene  where  Esmond  returns  to  the  Lady  Castlewood 
after  his  first  campaign,  and  ask  whether  it  could  have  been 
written  by  any  man  whose  heart  was  not  filled  with  charity: — 

"She  smiled  an  almost  wild  smile  as  she  looked  up  at  him.  The 
moon  was  up  by  this  time,  glittering  keen  in  the  frosty  sky.  He  could 
see,  for  the  first  time  now  clearly,  her  sweet  careworn  face. 

"Do  you  know  what  day  it  is?"  she  continued.  "It  is  the  29th 
of  December — it  is  your  birthday!  But  last  year  we  did  not  drink 
it — no,  no.  My  Lord  was  cold,  and  my  Harry  was  likely  to  die :  and 
my  brain  was  in  fever;  and  we  had  no  wine.  But  now — now  you  are 
come  again,  bringing  your  sheaves  with  you,  my  dear."  She  burst 
into  a  wild  flood  of  weeping  as  she  spoke;  she  laughed  and  sobbed 
on  the  young  man's  heart,  crying  out  wildly,  "bringing  your  sheaves 
with  you — your  sheaves  with  you!" 

As  he  had  sometimes  felt,  gazing  up  from  the  deck  at  midnight 
into  the  boundless  starlit  depths  overhead,  in  a  rapture  of  devout 
wonder  at  that  endless  brightness  and  beauty — in  some  such  a  way 
now,  the  depth  of  this  pure  devotion  (which  was,  for  the  first  time, 
revealed  to  him)  quite  smote  upon  him,  and  filled  his  heart  with 
thanksgiving.  Gracious  God,  who  was  he,  weak  and  friendless 
creature,  that  such  a  love  should  be  poured  out  upon  him?  Not  in 
vain — not  in  vain  has  he  lived — hard  and  thankless  should  he  be 
to  think  so — that  has  such  a  treasure  given  him.  What  is  ambition 
compared  to  that,  but  selfish  vanity?  To  be  rich,  to  be  famous? 
What  do  these  profit  a  year  hence,  when  other  names  sound  louder 
than  yours,  when  you  lie  hidden  away  under  the  ground,  along  with 
idle  titles  engraven  on  your  coffin?  But  only  true  love  lives  after 
you — follows  your  memory  with  secret  blessing— or  precedes  you, 
and  intercedes  for  you.  Non  omnis  moriar—U  dying,  I  yet  live  in  a 
tender  heart  or  two;  nor  am  lost  and  hopeless  living,  if  a  sainted 
departed  soul  still  loves  and  prays  for  me." 

Thackeray  said  that  he  quarrelled  with  Dickens's  art  "a  thou- 


332  THE   VICTORIAN   NOVEL 

sand  and  a  thousand  times,"  but  he  had  only  praise  for  the 
generosity  of  his  rival's  spirit.  And  certainly,  in  the  generosity 
of  his  own  spirit,  Thackeray,  the  severe  satirist,  scarcely  less 
than  Dickens,  the  indulgent  sentimentalist,  has  contributed  to 
enlarge  the  office  of  sympathy  and  strengthen  the  ties  of  human 
love.  In  this  direction,  though  by  very  different  paths,  the  two 
writers  have  reached  virtually  one  goal. 

It  is  convenient,  though  scarcely  fair  to  their  own  virility,  to 
think  of  Charles  Ileade  and  Anthony  Trollope  as  satellites,  respect- 
ively, of  the  two  great  luminaries  just  treated.    Ileade 
Charle.9         was  a  London  barrister,  who,  like  Dickens,  had   a 
Reade,  fondness  for  the  stage.     He  began  by  writing  plays, 

"    ,      "    ■    but  his  first  popular  success  was  made  with  a  novel  of 
.4  nthony  •      .  i  •  i    i 

Trollope        stage  life  into  which  he  turned  one  of  his  plays.  Peg 

isi5-if^s2.  Wofpngton  (1852).  His  three  most  important  books 
are  It'fi  Never  too  Late  to  Mend  (1856),  The  Cloister 
and  the  Hearth  (18G1),  and  Griffith  Gaunt  (1800).  The  first 
is  a  social  novel,  like  certain  of  Dickens's,  exposing  abuses  in 
the  management  of  prisons  and  convict  labor.  The  second  is 
an  admirable  historical  romance  of  the  Renaissance  in  the  time 
of  Erasmus's  childhood.  The  third  has  its  central  interest  in 
moral  delinquency  and  the  marriage  problem.  Reade  worked 
mostly  from  "documents"  of  all  sorts,  which  he  collected  assidu- 
ously but  used  with  great  freedom.  He  handled  human  passions 
and  deeds  without  gloves.  With  a  marked  vein  of  sentiment, 
with  a  tendency  to  exaggerate,  and  a  leaning  toward  romance 
through  all  his  realism,  he  falls  very  clearly  into  the  class  which 
Dickens  led.  Trollope  stands  rather  on  the  side  of  Thackeray; 
his  observations  were  made  in  much  the  same  upper  middle- 
class  society.  He  held  for  years  a  position  in  the  Civil  Service. 
He  was  an  indefatigable  fox-hunter  and  traveller,  and  an  equally 
indefatigable  writer,  turning  off  at  the  rate  of  so  many  pages 
a  day,  wherever  he  might  travel,  his  numerous  serially  pub- 
lished novels.  The  Warden  (1855)  was  the  first  of  importance, 
and  Barchester  Towers  (1857),  which  followed  it,  may  contest 


KINGSLEY  333 

with  The  Last  Chronicle  of  Barset  (1867)  for  the  position  of 

the  best.     These  all  belong  to  a  series  of  thirteen  "Cathedral 

Stories,"  portraying  life  among  the  country  clergy  and  gentry. 

A  very  faithful,  Miss-Austen-like  reflection  of  things  as  they 

are,  or  rather  were,  and  the  power  to  amuse,  if  not  often  to 

thrill  or  fascinate,  are  their  main  characteristics. 

Charles    Kingsley,   a  Cambridge    man,    and    successively 

curate,  rector,  lecturer  on  literature,  professor  of  history,  and 

canon  of  Westminster,  is  the  most  distinctly  aca- 

j,.      ,  demic   among   these   novelists.     Through   his    ver- 

Kingsley,  .  .  "  .  ,  '^ . 

1819-1875.  satility,  however,  he  associated  himself  with  various 
classes  of  writers.  He  was,  to  begin  with,  a  friend 
of  Tennyson  and  a  poet  of  real  excellence;  his  songs,  for  in- 
stance The  Three  Fishers,  The  Sands  of  Dee,  Lorraine,  etc.,  are 
widely  admired,  while  the  long  poem  of  Andromeda  (1858)  is 
absolutely  the  best  example  of  dactylic  hexameters  in  the  Eng- 
lish language.  He  responded  to  the  Oxford  ^Movement,  going 
with  the  wing  of  so-called  Christian  socialists,  and  later  engaging 
in  an  unfortunate  controversy  with  Newman.  He  was  an 
enthusiastic  disciple  of  some  of  Carlyle's  doctrines,  and  in  his 
interest  in  historical  study  and  writing  not  unlike  his  brother- 
in-law,  Froude.  But  his  best  work  was  done  in  fiction,  and  in 
this  he  showed  much  the  same  facility  as  his  fellow-novelists  in 
passing  from  a  realistic  treatment  of  contemporary  themes  to 
historical  romance.  The  middle  of  the  century  was  a  time  of 
much  anxiety  for  England  because  of  the  revolutionary  temper 
and  vigorously  pressed  demands  of  the  working  classes  as  evi- 
denced in  the  Chartist  movement.  Kingsley  put  forAvard  his 
remedy  of  liberal  church  reform  and  Christian  harmony  in  two 
passionate  novels.  Yeast  (1848)  and  Alton  Locke  (1850).  Then 
he  produced  the  historical  novels  Hypatia  (1853)  and  West- 
ward Ho!  (1855).  The  former  presents,  not  without  a  lesson 
for  modern  times,  the  struggle  between  Greek  philosophy 
and  Christianity  in  Alexandria  in  the  fifth  century.  The  latter 
sets  forth,  in  brilliant  narrative,  the  adventurous  and  buccaneer- 


334  THE   VICTORIAN   NOVEL 

ing  spirit  of  Elizabethan  days.  It  attempts  also  to  use  the  prose 
style  of  the  Elizabethan  period,  as  Thackeray  had  used  the 
English  of  the  Queen  Anne  period  in  Esmond.  One  more 
book  of  Kingsley's  should  be  mentioned,  The  Water  Babies 
(1863),  a  delightful  mixture  of  fairy-tale,  science,  and  satire. 
The  two  historical  novels,  however,  are  his  masterjjieces. 

The  increasing  part  which  women  have  taken  in  the  produc- 
tion of  literature  becomes  especially  evident  in  the  later  history 
of  the  novel.  Among  the  popular  writers  of  the  middle  of  the 
century,  for  instance,  may  be  noted  Mrs.  Gaskell,  the  author 
of  various  realistic  tales  not  unlike  Maria  Edgeworth's,  several 
of  which — Mary  Barton  (1848),  a  kind  of  factory  novel,  and 
Cranford  (1853),  an  entertaining  picture  of  feminine  society 
in  a  small,  neglected  village — have  become  fairly  classic.  There 
were,  moreover,  two  women  of  the  time,  who  in  our  present 
estimate  measure  up  nearly  to  the  standard  of  Dickens  and 
Thackeray — who  evinced,  that  is  to  say,  genuinely  creative 
powers.  The  first  of  these  was  Charlotte  Bronte,  the  other, 
George  Eliot. 

The  life  of  Charlotte  Bronte,  like  the  Yorkshire  moors 
which  bounded  it,  was  pitifully  starved  and  stern.  Her  father 
was  a  poor  clergyman  of  Irish  birth,  not  over  sym- 
Charloite  pathetic,  and  as  his  children  were  early  left  mother- 
igin_lorr  l^^s,  thc  picture  of  their  existence  at  Haworth  par- 
sonage has  little  to  relieve  its  sombre  shades.  There 
was  apparently  nothing  for  the  three  girls  but  to  become  gov- 
ernesses, and  Charlotte  and  Emily,  the  two  elder,  spent  some 
heartsick  months  in  Brussels  in  pursuance  of  this  purpose.  At 
home  they  found  pastime  in  writing  poems  and  stories,  and  in 
1846  the  three,  Charlotte,  Emily,  and  Anne,  published  together 
a  volume  of  verse,  "  by  Currer,  Ellis,  and  Acton  Bell."  The 
best  of  the  verse  was  by  Emily,  but  it  attracted  little  attention. 
Charlotte  had  still  less  success  with  her  first  novel,  The  Pro- 
cessor, which  was  offered  to  various  publishers  in  vain.  Then, 
in  the  face  of  discouragement  and  domestic  drudgery  and  90r- 


CHARLOTTE    BRONTE  335 

row,  her  brother  disgraced  and  dying,  her  father  temporarily 
bHnd,  Charlotte,  with  a  persistence  little  short  of  heroic,  wrote, 
out  of  her  heart  and  life,  Jane  Eyre.  The  book  was  published 
late  in  1847,  and  was  followed  very  shortly  by  Emily's  essen- 
tially Gothic  tale  of  horror,  Wuthering  Heights,  and  Anne's 
much  tamer  Agnes  Grey.  Who,  asked  the  public,  were  the 
authors?  Who,  in  particular,  was  "Currer  Bell?"  For  Jane 
Eyre  had  made  a  profound  sensation.  The  identity  of  the 
sisters  was  soon  disclosed;  but  Emily  died  in  1848  and  Anne  in 
1849,  and  only  the  heroine  of  Jane  Eyre,  now  revealed  as  a 
genius,  remained.  Two  more  books  were  to  come  from  her 
pen  before  she  too  succumbed — Shirley  (1849)  and  Villette 
(1853),  both  also  in  many  respects  "documentary,"  the  latter 
reflecting  her  Brussels  experiences.  The  Professor  was  pub- 
lished after  her  death;  but  nothing  dislodged  the  earlier  novel 
from  its  position  as  her  masterpiece,  although  Villette  may  be 
reckoned  a  close  competitor. 

Charlotte  Bronte  was  not  acquainted  with  Jane  Austen's 
works,  but  she  was  really  first  of  the  later  school  to  get  back 
to  that  minute  and  faithful  transcript  of  reality  which  is  the 
fullest  warrant  for  the  use  of  the  term  "realism."  Dickens 
ran  too  much  to  extravagance  and  caricature;  Thackeray's,  Lyt- 
ton's,  Trollope's,  and  Mrs.  Gaskell's  efforts  in  this  kind  all  date 
later  than  Jane  Eyre.  Miss  Bronte  proposed  to  take  a  heroine 
"as  small  and  as  plain"  as  herself;  and  Jane  Eyre  is  herself, 
not  only  in  smallness  and  plainness,  but  in  defiant  unconven- 
tionality  and  in  the  imagination  and  passion  seething  beneath  a 
lid  of  poverty  and  bigoted  repression.  She  is  an  orphan  cruelly 
treated  by  an  aunt,  is  sent  away  to  school,  becomes  a  governess, 
and  falls  desperately  in  love  with  the  big-nosed,  grim-jawed, 
forty-year-old  man  of  the  world,  the  self-confessed  villain 
Rochester,  in  whose  house  she  has  become  installed.  This 
is  how  she  talks  to  herself: 

"How  dared  you?  Poor  stupid  dupo!  (-'oul<l  not  even  self- 
interest  make  you  wiser?     You  repeated  to  yourself  this  morning 


336  THE    VICTORIAN   NOVEL 

the  brief  secne  of  last  night?  Cover  your  face  and  be  ashamed!  He 
said  something  in  praise  of  your  eyes,  did  he?  ...  . 

"Listen  then,  Jane  Eyre,  to  your  sentence:  to-morrow,  place  the 
glass  before  you,  and  draw  in  chalk  your  own  picture,  faithfully; 
without  softening  one  defect;  omit  no  harsh  line,  smooth  away  no 
displeasing  irregularity;  write  under  it,  'Portrait  of  a  Governess, 
disconnected,  poor,  and  plain.'  " 

And  this  is  how  she  talks  to  Rochester — for  she  always  spoke 
what  she  thought  and  believed,  even  when  upon  their  first 
acquaintance  he  asked  her  whether  she  did  not  think  him 
handsome: 

"I  tell  you  I  must  go!"  I  retorted,  roused  to  something  like 
passion.  "Do  you  think  I  can  stay  to  become  nothing  to  you?  Do 
you  think  I  am  an  automaton? — a  machine  without  feelings?  and 
can  bear  to  have  my  morsel  of  bread  snatched  from  my  lips,  and  my 
drop  of  living  water  dashed  from  my  cup?  Do  you  think,  because  I 
am  poor,  obscure,  plain,  and  little,  I  am  soulless  and  heartless? 
You  think  wrong! — I  have  as  much  soul  as  you, — and  full  as  much 
heart!  And  if  God  had  gifted  me  with  some  beauty  and  much 
wealth,  I  should  have  made  it  as  liard  for  you  to  leave  me,  as  it  is 
now  for  me  to  leave  you.  I  am  not  talking  to  you  now  through  the 
medium  of  custom,  conventionalities,  nor  even  of  mortal  flesh — it 
is  my  spirit  that  addresses  your  spirit;  ]ust  as  if  both  had  passed 
through  the  grave,  and  we  stood  at  God's  feet,  equal, — as  we  are!" 

It  needs  no  words  to  prove  that  this  is  a  startlingly  original 
and  live  book,  one  of  the  kind  that  leaves  furrows  on  the  soul. 
It  has  faults  enough,  especially  in  plot,  and  in  the  almost  ridicu- 
lous delineation  of  those  characters  and  scenes  that  lay  outside 
of  Miss  Bronte's  observation.  Evidently,  what  she  understood, 
she  could — and  little  more.  When  experience  failed  her,  she 
fell  back  upon  conventionality.  The  realism  of  the  story,  too, 
is  curiously  crossed  with  melodrama.  Yet  the  melodrama  is 
half  redeemed  by  the  poetic  feeling  that  accompanies  it.  The 
lurid  lights  are  of  no  stage  manufacture,  but  spring  from  a 
genuine  imagination.  Thus  the  homely  woof  of  the  tale  is 
often  shot  with  colors  of  romance.  Particularly  rich  and  strange, 
with  all  their  truthfulness,  are  the  descriptions  of  nature  in  both 


GKOKCiK   Ki-ioa 
Charlotte  Bronte 


WlI.I.IA.VI  >Ia.KEPEA.CE  THA.C-KERA.V 

Charles  Dickens 


'  CHARLOTTE    BRONTE  337 

its  bright  and  its  sombre  moods,  descriptions  drawn  as  by  a 
spirit  in  some,  occult  relation  of  sympathy 

"  It  was  not  without  a  certain  wild  pleasure  I  ran  before  the  wind 
dehvering  my  trouble  of  mind  to  the  measureless  air-torrent  thunder- 
ing through  space.  Descending  the  laurel-walk,  I  faced  the  wreck 
of  the  chestnut-tree;  it  stood  up,  black  and  riven:  the  trunk,  split 
down  the  centre,  gaped  ghastly.  The  cloven  halves  were  not  broken 
from  each  other,  for  the  firm  base  and  strong  roots  kept  them  un- 
sundered  below ;  the  sap  could  flow  no  more.  ...  As  I  looked  up  at 
them  the  moon  appeared  momentarily  in  that  part  of  the  sky  which 
filled  their  fissure;  her  disk  was  blood-red  and  half  overcast;  she 
seemed  to  throw  on  me  one  bewildered,  dreary  glance,  and  buried 
herself  again  instantly  in  the  deep  drift  of  cloud.  The  wind  fell,  for 
a  second,  round  Thornfield ;  but  far  away  over  wood  and  water, 
poured  a  wild,  melancholy  wail." 

Or  take  the  same  thing  under  a  figure,  and  find  concentrated 
in  two  sentences  the  qualities  of  the  book,  its  realism  and  its 
poetry,  its  natural  magic  and  its  hea^t-^\Tinging,  as  it  was  heart- 
WTung,  personal  passion: 

"Jane  Eyre,  who  had  been  an  ardent,  expectant  woman — almost 
a  bride — was  a  cold,  solitary  girl  again :  her  life  was  pale ;  her  prospects 
were  desolate.  A  Christmas  frost  had  come  at  midsiimmer;  a  white 
December  storm  had  whirled  over  June;  ice  glazed  the  ripe  apples; 
drifts  crushed  the  blowing  roses;  on  hay-field  and  corn-field  lay  a 
frozen  shroud;  lanes  which  last  night  blushed  full  of  flowers,  to-day 
were  pathless  with  untrodden  snow;  and  the  Avoods,  which  twelve 
hours  since  waved  leafy  and  fragrant  as  groves  between  the  tropics, 
now  spread,  waste,  wild,  and  white  as  pine-forests  in  wintry  Norway." 

After  all,  w^hat  Miss  Bronte  understood  is  enough;  and  it  is  this 
central  passion,  this  volcanic  utterance  of  burning,  human 
truth,  that  makes  her  and  her  novels  great. 

Charlotte  Bronte  was  "famous  and  dead"  before  George 
Eliot,  but  three  years  her  junior,  had  published  anything  but 
a  few  translations  and  essays.  "George  Eliot"  was  the  pen- 
name  of  iVIary  Ann  Evans  (later  Marian  Evans,  and  ultimately 
Mrs.  Cross),  the  daughter  of  a  Methodist  land-steward  of  War- 
wickshire.    Early  in  life  she  changed  from  strict  to  distinctly 


338  THE   VICTORIAN   NOVEL 

liberal  religious    views,    spent  a  year  (1849-50)    in   study  at 
Geneva,  and  returned  to   England  to  assist  soon  afterward  in 

editing  the  radical  Westminster  Review.  She  was 
^ilTn-i^^n   '  ^^^^  brought  into  contact  with   eminent  thinkers, 

among  them  George  Henry  Lewes,  John  Stuart  Mill 
and  Herbert  Spencer.  With  the  first-named,  a  brilliant  critic 
of  philosophical  bent,  she  formed  a  union  which  lasted  until  his 
death  in  1878.  Very  shortly  before  her  own  death  she  married 
Mr.  J.  W.  Cross,  a  New  York  banker  and  an  old  friend. 

It  was  under  the  influence  of  Spencer  and  Lewes  that 
George  Eliot  discovered  where  her  real  talent  lay,  and  also 
under  the  influence  of  them  and  others,  including  the  French 
positivist  philosopher  Comte,  that  she  came  in  the  end  to  overlay 
that  talent  with  such  a  Aveb  of  science,  philosophy,  and  ethical 
doctrine  as  almost  to  obscure  its  brilliance.  In  1857  she  con- 
tributed to  Blackwood's  Magazine  "The  Sad  Fortunes  of  the 
Rev.  Amos  Barton,"  which  with  two  other  very  realistic  tales 
was  published  the  next  year  under  the  title  of  Scenes  of  Clerical 
Life.  In  1859  appeared  her  first  long  novel,  Adam  Bedc,  which 
placed  her  at  once  among  the  foremost  writers  of  the  time. 
It  was  followed  in  1860  by  another  long  novel.  The  Mill  on  the 
Floss,  and  that  in  1861  by  a  shorter  one,  Silas  Marner.  Then 
came  a  somewhat  marked  change.  While  travelling  in  Italy 
she  formed  an  "  ambitious  project,"  which  was  to  write  a  romance 
of  the  Italian  Renaissance  with  the  scene  laid  in  Florence  at 
the  time  of  Savonarola's  career  and  mart}Tdom.  The  feat 
was  accomplished,  and  the  result  was  the  ponderous  but  still 
successful  story  of  Romola  (1863).  Her  next  exploit  was  in  the 
field  of  English  politics  and  love,  with  Felix  Holt  (1866),  per- 
haps her  weakest  novel,  as  the  result.  Then,  after  her  drama 
of  the  Spanish  Gypsy  (1868)  and  some  not  very  poetical  poetry, 
appeared  a  third  novel  of  this  later,  more  complex  t\pe,  Middle- 
march  (1871-72).  So  well  did  this  suit  the  taste  of  the  time  for 
patient  analysis,  complex  character  drawing,  and  free  discussion 
of  moral  problems,  that  it  established  a  kind  of  George  Eliot  cult, 


ELIOT  339 

and  her  name,  oddly  enough,  was  mentioned  along  with  Shake- 
speare's and  Goethe's.  Her  last  novel,  Daniel  Deronda  (1876), 
dealing  not  uns}Tnpathetically  with  modern  Hebrew  life  and 
ideals,  showed  once  more  a  falling  off  from  its  predecessor. 

It  is  still  too  early  to  speak  with  confidence  of  the  final 
place  and  importance  of  this  work.  One  thing,  however,  begins 
to  seem  clear,  and  that  is  that  the  significance  which  at  the 
time  of  George  Eliot's  death  was  attached  to  her  later  achieve- 
ments was  an  exaggerated  one,  and  that  the  four  novels  of 
the  early  group  show  the  greater  vitality.  They  are  works 
of  much  less  study  and  labor,  being  less  weighted  with  "pur- 
pose," and  springing  more  directly  from  the  author's  experience 
and  observation.  Like  the  Vicar  of  Wakefield,  which  the  author 
much  admired,  they  are  racy  with  the  humor  and  pathos  of 
peasant  and  lower  middle-class  life.  The  Scenes  of  Clerical 
Life  were  soon  discovered  to  contain  portraits  dangerously 
"like."  Maggie  Tul liver,  the  rebellious  genius  of  The  Mill  on 
the  Floss,  was  clearly  none  other  than  ^Nlary  Ann  Evans  herself, 
and  Tom  was  her  brother  Isaac;  while  Aunt  Glegg  and  lier 
j)arsimonious  spouse.  Aunt  Pullet,  the  hen-pecked  Uncle  Pullet, 
Bob  Jakin  the  pedler,  and  the  rest,  came  out  of  the  same  pro- 
vincial environment.  Miss  Evans  had  an  aunt,  too,  who, 
like  Dinah  Morris  in  Adam  Bede,  was  a  ^Methodist  exhorter, 
and  who  had  told  her  just  such  an  anecdote  of  child-murder 
as  plays  an  important  part  in  that  novel.  Adam  Bede  was 
partly  modelled  after  her  own  father.  The  homely  truthful- 
ness of  the  scenes  is  not  the  least  of  their  charms.  One  does 
not  readily  forget  such  a  picture  as  that  of  Maggie  Tulli\er 
slipping  fearfully  in  to  dinner  after  cutting  off  her  hair  in  a  pique 
at  being  scolded  for  not  keeping  it  behind  her  ears: 

Mrs.  TuUivcr's  scream  made  all  eyes  turn  towards  the  same 
point  as  her  own,  and  Maggie's  cheeks  and  ears  began  to  burn,  while 
uncle  Glegg,  a  kind-looking,  white-haired  old  gentleman,  said — 

"Heyday!  what  little  gell's  this — why,  I  don't  know  her.  Is  it 
some  little  gell  you've  picked  up  in  the  road,  Kezia?" 


340  THE   VICTORIAN    NOVEL 

"Why,  she's  gone  and  cut  her  hair  herself,"  said  Mr.  TuUiver  in 
an  under-tone  to  Mr.  Deane,  laughing  with  much  enjoyment.  "Did 
you  ever  know  .such  a  little  hussy  as  it  is?" 

"Why,  little  miss,  you've  made  yourself  look  very  funny,"  said 
uncle  Pifllet,  and  perhaps  he  never  in  his  life  made  an  observation 
which  was  felt  to  be  so  lacerating. 

"Fie,  for  shame!"  said  aunt  Glegg,  in  her  loudest,  severest  tone 
of  reproof.  "Little  gells  as  cut  their  own  hair  should  be  whipped 
and  fed  on  bread  and  water — not  come  and  sit  down  with  their  aUnts 
and  uncles." 

"Ay,  ay,"  said  uncle  Glegg,  meaning  to  give  a  playful  turn  to 
this  denunciation,  "she  must  be  sent  to  jail,  I  think,  and  they'll  cut 
the  rest  of  her  hair  off  there,  and  make  it  all  even." 

"She's  more  like  a  gypsy  nor  ever,"  said  aunt  Pullet,  in  a  pity- 
ing tone;  "it's  very  bad  luck,  sister,  as  the  gell  should  be  so  brown — 
the  boy's  fair  enough.  I  doubt  it'll  stand  in  her  way  i'  life  to  be  so 
brown." 

"She's  a  naughty  child,  as'U  break  her  mother's  heart,"  said 
Mrs.  Tulliver,  with  the  tears  in  her  eyes. 

Maggie  seemed  to  be  listening  to  a  chorus  of  reproach  and  deris- 
ion. Her  first  flush  came  from  anger,  which  gave  her  a  transient 
power  of  defiance,  and  Tom  thought  she  was  braving  it  out,  sup- 
ported by  the  recent  appearance  of  the  pudding  and  custard.  Under 
this  impres.sion,  he  whispered,  "Oh  my!  Maggie,  I  told  you  you'd 
catch  it."  He  meant  to  be  friendly,  but  Maggie  felt  convinced  that 
Tom  was  rejoicing  in  her  ignominy.  Her  feeble  power  of  defiance 
left  her  in  an  instant,  her  heart  swelled,  and,  getting  up  from  her 
chair,  she  ran  to  her  father,  hid  her  face  on  his  shoulder,  and  burst 
out  into  loud  sobbing. 

"Come,  come,  my  wench,"  said  her  father,  soothingly,  putting 
his  arm  round  her,  "never  mind;  you  was  i'  the  right  to  cut  it  off  if 
it  plagued  you;  give  over  crying:  father'U  take  your  part." 

But  beyond  this  simple  realism  the  stories  have  their  interest  of 
humorous  or  tragic  plot,  and  are  provided  with  a  quite  sufficient 
and  serious  criticism  of  life.  Silas  Marner,  for  instance,  the 
weaver  of  Raveloe,  is  a  wronged  and  embittered  man  who  finds 
nothing  to  live  for  but  his  hoard  of  gold,  but  who  is  brought 
back  to  human  sympathy  by  the  love  of  a  child.  "Eh,  there's 
trouble  i'  this  world,"  Mrs.  Winthrop  had  counselled  him,  "and 
there's  things  as  we  can  niver  make  out  the  rights  on.     And  all 


ELIOT  341 

as  we've  got  to  do  is  to  tnisten,  Master  Marner — to  do  the  right 
thing  as  fur  as  we  know,  and  to  trusten."  And  Silas  Marner 
declares  in  the  end,  "Since  the  time  the  child  was  sent  to  me, 
and  I'vse  come  to  love  her  as  myself,  I've  had  light  enough  to 
trusten  by;  and  now  she  says  she'll  never  leave  me,  "I  think  I 
shall  trusten  till  I  die." 

The  merits  of  the  later  novels  are  to  be  sought  in  their 
keen  analysis  of  character  and  ethical  motive,  and  the  under- 
lying philosophy  of  life.  Tito  Melema,  the  beautiful  young 
Greek  in  Romola,  is  a  self-indulgent  creature,  not  wholly  indiffer- 
ent to  the  call  of  duty,  but  weakly  following  the  easiest  line  of 
conduct  till  character  gradually  slips  away,  and  destiny,  in  the 
form  of  Baldassarre's  avenging  fingers,  takes  him  by  the  throat. 
Dr.  Lydgate,  to  select  only  one  character  from  the  almost  epical 
Middlemarch,  is  another  study  in  degeneration — a  man  sacri- 
ficing all  his  intellectual  strength  and  aspiration  to  an  unworthy 
but  unconquerable  passion,  allowing  the  beauty  of  one  weak 
woman  to  be  the  instrument  of  loss  to  the  world  at  large.  It 
is  obvious  that  George  Eliot  has  a  strong  propensity  toward 
the  portrayal  of  frustrated  lives;  she  reiterates  in  various 
forms  the  human  truth  that  "there's  a  sort  of  wrong  that  can 
never  be  made  up  for."  Yet  she  is  not  a  pessimist.  The  virtue 
of  the  individual  may  not  bring  personal  reward,  but  she  teaches 
very  plainly  that  the  self-sacrifice  of  the  individual  means  hope 
and  help  for  humanity,  just  as  surely  as  the  refusal  to  make 
such  sacrifice  means  far  more  than  personal  ruin.  Altruism 
is  the  name  coined  by  Comte  for  this  doctrine,  and  if  one  must 
reduce  these  novels  of  purpose  to  something  like  a  formula,  it 
must  take  this  name.  One  may  not  care  to  treat  creative  litera- 
ture thus;  but  facts  are  not  to  be  ignored,  and  it  is  one  of  the 
facts  of  a  strenuously  intellectual  and  introspective  age  that  art 
itself  has  been  often  the  avowed  instrument  of  a  philosophical 
or  moral  creed.  From  Walter  Scott,  the  careless  romancer,  to 
George  Eliot,  the  painstaking  moralist,  is  a  very  great  span, 
but  the  nineteenth  century  novel  bridged  it  in  less  than  fifty  years. 


CHAPTER  XX 

MISCELLANEOUS  VICTORIAN    PROSE 

CAKLYLE     UUSKIN     NEWMAN     AKNOLD     HUXLEY 

We  are  now  to  take  up  those  discursive  forms  of  prose  that 
lie  outsi(Je  of  (Tcative  fiction — the  prose  that  serves  as  an  embodi- 
ment of  ideas  rather  than  of  imagination  and  invention.  It 
ranges  from  the  brief  essay  to  the  elaborate  history.  History 
and  criticism,  indeed,  comprehend  the  major  portion  of  such 
discursive  prose  of  the  Victorian  age  as  rises  to  the  status  of 
literature,  and  it  is  further  significant  that  criticism  should  be 
the  more  conspicuous  of  the  two.  The  style,  we  shall  find,  is 
free,  varying  with  the  individual  quite  as  much  as  in  the  earlier 
part  of  the  century.  The  themes,  moreover,  are  as  diverse  as 
the  interests  and  activities  of  the  age.  It  is  of  course  natural 
that  such  activities  should  be  reflected  more  directly  in  this  prose 
than  in  poetry  or  fiction.  Now  and  then  a  social  problem  may 
be  made  the  half  serious  basis  of  an  elaborate  poem,  as  in  Ten- 
nyson's Princess;  politics  may  be  glanced  at  in  an  occasional 
verse  like  that  about  Freedom  "slowly  broadening  down;"  or 
science  may  be  employed  in  a  chance  figure.  But  the  prose 
essay  or  treatise  attacks  these  subjects  directly.  We  may  look 
to  find,  therefore,  in  the  literary  prose  of  the  middle  of  the  century 
abundant  echoes  of  chartism,  philanthropy,  church  reform,  the 
new  education,  science  and  art, — in  short,  of  the  whole  liberal 
movement. 

Of  strictly  critical  writing,  the  larger  part  proceeds  from 
the  later  years  of  the  period  now  under  consideration.  Narration 
and  exhortation,  always  more  attractive  from  the  literary  point 
of  view  than  deliberate  exposition,  still  dominated  in  the  earlier 

342 


CARLYLE  343 

years,  and  we  begin  this  chapter  with  Carlyle,  who  was  far  more 
a  historian  and  exhorter  than  he  was  a  critic.  Nor  should  it  be 
forgotten  that  the  historian  Macaulay  belongs  here  half  by  right. 
We  placed  him  with  the  earlier  group  partly  because  of  his  links 
with  the  past  and  his  share  in  the  development  of  journalism,  and 
partly  because,  though  younger  than  Carlyle,  with  whose  name 
his  is  often  associated,  he  began  to  write  earlier  and  died  earlier, 
so  that  he  seems  to  have  belonged  to  a  remoter  generation.  But 
his  great  History  was  conceived  and  written  late — after  Carlyle' s 
French  Revolution  in  fact — and  is  by  every  consideration 
one  of  the  monuments  of  Victorian  prose.  Added  to  Carlyle's 
work,  and  to  that  of  such  successors  as  Froude  and  Freeman,  it 
would  help  to  strike  more  evenly  the  balance  of  the  ?ge  be- 
tween the  two  classes   of   prose. 

Thomas  Carlyle  is  not  only  a  conspicuous  figure  in  nine- 
teenth century   English  literature,  but  also    one    of    the   most 

commanding  and  picturesque  personalities  in  the 
„    ,  ,  history  of  genius.     He  was  the  third  of  that  very 

1795-1881.    dissimilar  trio  who  for  nearly  a  hundred  years  gave 

Scotland  an  honored  place  in  English  letters.  Scott 
published  his  first  work  the  year  Burns  died,  and  Carlyle  his 
first  important  work  the  year  after  Scott  died;  the  succession 
was  practically  unbroken.  ^loreover,  the  life  of  Carlyle  began 
just  as  that  of  Burns  was  closing,  for  he  was  born  five  years  before 
the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century.  He  was  the  son  of  a  stone- 
mason of  the  village  of  Ecclefechan,  in  the  south  of  Scotland. 
At  the  age  of  fourteen  he  went  to  Edinburgh,  walking  the  entire 
distance  of  eighty  miles,  to  attend  the  University.  His  primary 
object  was  to  enter  the  ministry,  but  this  purpose  he  later  aban- 
doned; and  somewhat  later  still  he  passed  through  an  agonizing 
but  finally  victorious  spiritual  struggle  like  that  recounted  of 
Teufelsdrockh  in  Sartor  Rcmrtus.  After  leaving  the  University, 
he  tried  teaching,  but  without  much  success;  law,  which  he  read 
for  a  time,  he  also  abandoned.  Meanwhile,  he  was  writing 
book  reviews,  translations  for  the  magazines,  and  articles  for 


344  MISCELLANEOUS   VICTORIAN    PROSE  ' 

encyclopaedias.  His  first  book,  Life  of  Schiller  (1825),  was 
originally  a  contribution  to  the  London  Magazine,  that  foster- 
mother  of  botii  Lamb  and  De  Quincey.  In  1826  took  place  his 
marriage  to  Jane  Baillie  Welsh,  a  woman  of  beauty  and  intel- 
lectual attainments,  who  sacrificed  more  to  her  admiration  of 
Carlyle's  genius  than  most  women  would  have  cared  to  do,  for  in 
1828,  in  almost  desperate  poverty,  the  pair  were  obliged  to 
remove  to  the  Welsh  family  manor  of  Craigenputtock.  The 
six  lonesome  years  they  spent  there  were  perhaps  not  wholly 
unhappy,  though  Carlyle,  with  his  dyspepsia,  his  want  of  domestic 
sympathy,  his  morose  meditations,  and  his  ambitions  and  dis- 
appointments, was  not  made  for  happiness.  It  was  at  Craigen- 
puttock that  he  wrote  Sartor  Resartus.  Since  the  public  would 
not  have  his  ordinary  work,  he  evolved  this  extraordinary  one, 
a  thing  at  once  satirically  Swiftian  and  transcendentally 
Goethean,  and  composed  in  a  style  that  was  a  little  like  that  of 
Sterne  or  of  Richter,  but  more  like  that  of  no  one  under  the 
sun.  It  was  published  in  Eraser's  Magazine  in  1833-34,  when 
it  excited  practically  only  amazement  or  ridicule;  though  the 
young  American,  Emerson,  was  sufficiently  attracted  by  it  to 
seek  out  the  still  unproclaimed  genius  at  his  lonely  farm. 

Then  Carlyle,  almost  forty  years  of  age,  made  the  last 
move  of  a  struggling  man  of  letters.  He  went  to  London,  took 
up  his  home  in  Cheyne  Row,  Chelsea,  where  he  was  to  live  for 
the  next  forty-seven  years,  and  wrote  again.  This  time  it  was 
the  French  Revolution,  and  though  the  manuscript  of  the  first 
volume  was  accidentally  burned  and  had  to  be  rewritten,  the 
whole  was  completed  and  published  by  1837.  "This,"  he 
declared  to  his  wife  as  he  finished  it,  "I  could  tell  the  world: 
You  have  not  had  for  a  hundred  years  any  book  that  comes 
more  direct  and  flamingly  from  the  heart  of  a  living  man." 
Fortunately,  the  hearts  of  living  men  responded,  and  Carlyle 
found  himself  at  last  upon  the  path  where  the  younger  feet 
of  Macaulay,  Dickens,  and  others,  had  preceded  him.  He 
lectured  successfully,  on  Heroes  and  Hero-Worship  (1841)  for 


CARLTLE  345 

example,  and  published  books  called  forth  by  the  political  and 
social  ferment  of  the  day,  among  them  Chartism  (1839),  Past 
and  Present  (I8i3),  and  Lattcr-D ay  Pamphlets  (1850).  He  ^^Tote 
more  history — the  Life  and  Letters  of  Oliver  Cromwell  (1845), 
and  that  most  stupendous  of  all  biography-histories,  Frederick 
the  Great  (1858-65),  in  sLx  volumes.  These,  with  certain  early 
essays  such  as  those  on  Burns  and  Goethe,  the  Correspondence 
with  Emerson,  and  the  Life  of  John  Sterling  (1851),  a  fine  ex- 
ample of  the  biography  of  a  lesser  man  by  a  greater,  constitute 
his  chief  works.  But  though  his  productive  period  was  by  1865 
ended,  his  days  were  much  prolonged.  His  wife  died  in  1866, 
during  his  absence  at  Edinburgh,  and  then,  too  late,  he  seemed 
fully  to  realize  her  rare  qualities,  and  mourned  sincerely  the 
hardships  which  his  too  selfish  devotion  to  his  own  ambitions 
had  imposed  upon  her.  His  remorseful  tribute  runs  through 
the  posthumous  Reminiscences  (1881),  a  book  that,  as  a  human 
document,  has  few  equals.  He  died  in  1881  and  was  buried 
at  the  place  of  his  birth. 

The  odd  title  of  Sartor  Resartus,  the  "Tailor  Re-Tailored," 
gives  some  indication  of  the  odd  nature  of  his  first  important 
book.  Carlvle  professed  to  have  discovered  a  chaotic 
„  German  work  on  the  philosophy  of  clothes  which 
he  undertook  to  present  to  the  British  public  in  the 
form  of  liberal  selections,  translated,  and  furnished  with  a  run- 
ning commentary  of  his  own.  He  even  introduced  some  auto- 
biography and  romance  by  giving,  in  a  second  part,  a  history  of 
the  supposed  German  author,  Professor  Teufelsdrockh  ("Devil's- 
dirt")  of  the  University  of  Weissnichtwo  ("  Xo-Man-Knows- 
Where").  By  some  readers  this  fiction  was  actually  taken  seri- 
ously; and  in  fact,  with  all  its  grotesqueries,  the  book  was  very 
seriously  intended.  It  is  a  Quixotic  tilt  at  the  shams  and  hollow- 
ness  of  conventional  life.  Clothes  are  employed  as  a  sjTnbol 
of  all  those  husks  and  'S\Tappages" — words,  customs,  institu- 
tions, or  what  not — beneath  which  sincerity  and  reality  forever 


346  MISCELLAXEOI'S   VICTORIAN   PROSE 

tend  to  hide.  Carlyle  was  playing  the  prophet,  with  the  purpose 
of  tearing  away  this  clothes-screen  and  letting  in  the  light. 

"P<;rliaps  not  once  in  a  lifetim(i  does  it  occur  to  your  ordinary 
bipod,  of  any  country  or  gfincration,  be  he  gold-mantlod  Prince  or 
vussct-jcrkincd  Pnji.sant,  that  his  Vestments  and  his  Self  arc  not  one 
and  indivisible;  that  he  is  naked  without  vestments,  till  he  buy  or 
steal  such,  and  by  fore-thought  sew  and  button  them." 

"The  beginning  of  all  Wisdom,  is  to  locjk  fixedly  on  Clothes,  or 
even  with  armed  eyesight,  till  they  become  transparent." 

Happy  he  who  can  look  through  the  Clothes  of  a  Man  (the  wool- 
len, and  fleshly,  and  official  Bank-paper,  and  State-paper  Clothes), 
into  the  Man  himself;  and  discern,  it  may  be,  in  this  or  the  other 
Dread  Potentate,  a  more  or  less  incompetent  Digestive-apparatus; 
yet  also  an  inscrutable  venerable  Mystery,  in  the  meanest  Tinker  that 
sees  with  eyes." 

In  the  third  part  of  the  book,  the  author  grows  fairly  rhapsodical, 
involving  himself  in  Platonic  mysticism,  and  treating  the  human 
body  and  the  material  universe  as  themselves  but  symbols,  the 
covering  of  the  spirit,  the  visible  garment  of  God. 

The  style  of  the  whole  is  even  more  novel  than  the  con- 
ception. Capitals  and  punctuation  marks  abound.  Words 
are  manufactured,  compounded,  and  distorted  ("gigmanity," 
"gulosity,"  "habilable,"  "pilgrimings,"  "speciosities,"  "beast- 
godhood")  with  the  utmost  license.  The  sentences  disregard 
every  law  of  order  or  emphasis.  These  eccentricities  are  ingen- 
iously laid  at  the  door  of  Teufelsdrockh.  "Of  his  sentences, 
perhaps  not  more  than  nine-tenths  stand  straight  on  their  legs; 
the  remainder  are  in  quite  angular  attitudes,  buttressed-up  by 
props  (of  parentheses  and  dashes),  and  ever  with  this  or  that 
tag-rag  hanging  from  them;  a  few  even  sprawl  out  helplessly 
on  all  sides,  quite  broken-backed  and  dismembered."  Yet  in 
not  a  few  passages,  such  a.s  the  famous  midnight  revery  of 
Teufelsdrockh  in  his  watchtower  above  the  city,  in  the  third 
djapter,  or  such  as  the  close  of  the  chapter  on  "Natural  Su- 
pcrnaturalism,"  the  writer's  imagination  and  passion  triumph 


CARLYLE  347 

over  his  studied  incoherence,  and  the  uncouth  prose  becomes  in 

everything  but  metre  absokite  poetry. 

In  the  French  Revolution  Carlyle  had  the  advantage  of  a 

subject  that  tied  him  to  facts  at  the  same  time  that  it  aUowed 

him    to    soar.     There    was    every    opportunity    for 

„  ,  ,.  ..imagination  and  poetrv,  but  none  for  mvsticism. 
Kevolution.  ®  .  .  .  "  , 

Hence,  perhaps,  its  more  immediate  success.     The 

book  is  not  for  those  who  want  a  simple  history,  but  for  tliosc 
wiio,  having  the  history,  want  it  vitahzed  and  impressed.  Car- 
lyle's  method  is  panoramic  and  dramatic.  By  vivid  description, 
by  .  exclamation,  by  the  use  of  the  historical  present,  by  ex- 
hortation or  admonition,  addressed  directly  to  the  actors,  he 
makes  the  past  live  again  as  perhaps  no  other  historian  has 
succeeded  in  doing — as  it  cannot  do  even  on  a  painter's  can- 
vas. We  hear  the  maddened  cries  of  the  mob  as  it  sweeps 
toward  the  Bastille.  We  watch  with  the  throngs  on  the  roofs 
while  the  funeral  of  Mirabeau  passes.  With  Marat  we  li:iten 
to  the  rap  on  the  bath-room  door  that  announces  Charlotte 
Corday.  W^ith  Robespierre  we  mount  the  steps  of  the  Tribune 
and  struggle  to  speak  against  the  mutinous  uproar.  We  share 
in  the  breathless  trepidation  of  tlie  Xight  of  Spurs  and  the 
•phlegmatic  King's  futile  flight  to  Varennes: 

"The  thick  shades  of  Night  are  fulliMg.  Postilions  cr.iok  and 
whip:  the  Royal  IJerline  is  through  Cloriiiont,  wiiere  (.'olonol  Coiiite 
de  Damas  got  a  word  whispered  to  it;  is  safe  through,  towards 
Varennes;  rusliing  at  the  rate  of  double  drink-money:  an  Unknown 
'Inconnu  on  horseback,'  shrieks  earnestly  some  hoarse  whisper,  not 
audible,  into  the  rushing  Carriage-window,  and  vanishes,  left  in  the 
night.  August  Travellers  palpitate;  nevertheless  overwearied  Nature 
sinks  every  one  of  them  into  a  kind  of  sleep.  Alas,  and  Drouet  and 
Clerk  Guillaume  spur;  taking  side-roads,  for  shortness,  for  safety; 
scattering  abroad  that  moral-certainty  of  theirs;  which  flies,  a  bird 
of  the  air  carrying  it! 

"And  your  rigorous  Quartermaster  spurs;  awakening  hoarse 
trumpet-tone, — as  here  at  Clermont,  calling  ont  Dragoons  gone  to 
bed.  Brave  Colonel  de  Damas  has  them  moiuited,  in  part,  these 
Clermont  men;  young  Cornet  Remy  dashes  off  with  a  few.     But 


348  MISCELLANEOUS  VICTORIAN   PROSE 

the  Patriot  Magistracy  is  out  here  at  Clermont  too;  National  Guards 
shrieking  for  ball-cartridges;  and  the  Village  'illuminates  itself;' — 
deft  Patriots  springing  out  of  bed;  alertly,  in  shirt  or  shift,  striking 
a  light;  sticking  up  each  his  farthing  candle,  or  penurious  oil-cruse, 
till  all  glitters  and  glimmers;  so  deft  are  they!  A  ca/nisado,  or  shirt- 
tumult,  everywhere:  storm-bell  set  a-ringing;  village-drum  beating 
furious  generale,  as  here  at  Clermont,  under  illumination;  distracted 
Patriots  pleading  and  menacing!  Brave  young  Colonel  de  Damas, 
in  that  uproar  of  distracted  Patriotism,  speaks  some  fire-sentences 
to  what  Troopers  he  has:  'Comrades  insulted  at  Sainte-Menehould : 
King  and  Country  calling  on  the  brave;'  then  gives  the  fire-word, 
Draiv  swords.  Whereupon,  alas,  the  Troopers  only  smite  their 
sword-handles,  driving  them  farther  home!  'To  me,  whoever  is  for 
the  King!'  cries  Damas  in  despair;  and  gallops,  he  with  some  poor 
loyal  Two,  of  the  Subaltern  sort,  into  the  bosom  of  the  Night." 

Wholly  unequalled   in   imagination   and  graphic  power,   and 

scarcely  surpassed   in   the  soberer  qualities  of  accuracy  and 

judgment,   Carlyle's  French  Revolution  takes  a  place  among 

the  modern  masterpieces  of  historical  composition. 

It  is  indeed  as  a  literary  artist  gifted  with  an  extraordinary 

imagination    that  Curlyle    is    most    secure    of    future    fame. 

Nature  gave  him  the  seeing  eye,  and  he  made  him- 

J .,       '      self  a  master  of  words  that  transfix.     In  a  sentence, 
o  Literary      ,  .  _  ' 

Artist.  ^^  ^   word    sometimes,  he    gives    a    portrait    that 

cannot  be  forgotten.  Coleridge  in  his  latter  years, 
for  instance,  seemed  to  him  "a  puffy,  anxious,  obstructed-look- 
ing,  fattish  old  man."  Lamb,  for  whom  he  had  little  kindness, 
was  "Cockney  to  the  marrow,  ....  the  leanest  of  mankind, 
tiny  black  breeches  buttoned  to  the  knee-cap  and  no  farther,  sur- 
mounting spindle-legs  also  in  black,  face  and  head  fineish,  black, 
bony,  lean."  Once  in  his  life  Teufelsdrockh  laughed,  and 
"through  those  murky  features,  a  radiant  ever-young  Apollo 
looked."  Mirabeau  is  "swart,  burly-headed!"  Robespierre  is 
"the  sea-green,  incorruptible."  In  the  same  Avay,  a  natural 
scene  is  indelibly  impressed.  The  night  before  the  battle  of  Dun- 
bar "is  wild  and  wet;  the  Harvest  Moon  wades  deep  among 
clouds  of  sleet  and  hail  ....  The  hoarse  sea  moans  bodeful. 


CARLYLE  349 

swinging  low  and  heavy  against  these  whinstone  bays ;  the  sea 
and  the  tempests  are  abroad,  all  else  asleep  but  we, — and  there  is 
One  that  rides  on  the  wings  of  the  wind."  It  is,  indeed,  not  alone 
the  graphic  realism  that  arrests  attention,  but  often,  also,  as  in 
the  last  example,  the  sudden  imaginative  sweep  into  regions 
of  the  true  sublime. 

Ever  since  the  time  of  his  public  acceptance,   however, 
Carlyle  has  doubtless  been  most  generally  regarded  as  a  philos- 
opher or  untheological  evangelist.     At  the  age  of 
As  a  forty-two  his  position  was  firmly  established,   and 

Prophet        admiration    was   seldom   thereafter   withheld.     His 

r,  '  ,  influence  over  other  men,  especially  over  idealists 
Kegcnerator.    .  . 

like  Tennyson  and  Ruskin,  was  of  a  marked  char- 
acter. Yet  the  r61e  of  prophet  to  which  he  clung,  which  he 
played  indeed  even  while  he  was  writing  history,  was  not  an  easy 
one,  and  his  admirers  were  themselves  often  compelled  to  dissent 
from  his  illogical  views.  His  moral  gospel  was  tonic  enough 
but  his  philosophy  was  not  constructive.  He  took  a  stubbornly 
hostile  attitude  toward  society,  scolded  while  he  exhorted,  and 
seldom  exhorted  in  a  kindly  tone.  He  could  see  little  good  in  the 
present;  there  is  always  an  ill  concealed  tone  of  contempt  in  his 
references  to  "these  days."  His  Past  and  Present  draws  a  strong 
contrast  between  mediseval  England  as  portrayed  by  a  chronicler 
of  the  old  Abbey  of  St.  Edmund's  Bury,  and  modern  England 
with  its  social  diseases  which  Corn  Laws  and  Chartism  seemed 
powerless  to  heal.  Philosophy,  he  thought,  was  become  hope- 
lessly utilitarian ;  Science,  so  insignificant  by  the  side  of  what  he 
liked  to  call  "Nescience,"  promised  to  lead  only  into  deserts  of 
Atheism;  Democracy  was  simply  a  form  of  Xo-government,  a 
great  Niagara  cataclysm  in  which  society  was  being  surely  en- 
gulfed. He  would  divide  men  sharply  into  leaders  and  led. 
The  leaders,  the  great,  wise,  gifted  men,  the  "heroes,"  are  few, 
and  come  but  at  intervals  in  the  history  of  the  world.  The  rest 
must  follow  them  like  sheep.  If  the  present  lacks  a  leader,  there 
is  nothing  to  do  but  copy  the  past  and  to  draw  inspiration  from 


350  MISCELLANEOUS  VICTORIAN    TUOSE 

the  leaders  that  have  been.  This  is  the  central  motive  of  his 
Heroes  and  Hero-worship,  in  which  he  selects  for  delineation 
great  men  as  they  have  appeared  at  various  stages  of  history— 
a  hero  simply  worshipped,  for  instance,  as  a  god  in  the  person 
of  Odin,  or  revered  as  a  man  of  letters  in  a  Samuel  Johnson. 
History,  on  this  theory,  becomes  mainly  the  biography  of  a  few 
great  men;  they  make  history.  This  is,  of  course,  strongly  in 
ontrast  with  the  more  general  modern  view  that  the  man  is 
largely  the  product  of  his  environment,  and  that  the  direction  of 
.s(*ciety  is  rather  the  resolution  of  a  multitude  of  forces  than  the 
radiation  of  a  central  one.  In  fact,  Carlyle  was  setting  himself 
s(|uarely  against  the  tendencies,  scientific  and  democratic,  which 
were,  and  continue  to  be,  the  governing  tendencies  of  the  age. 
He  stood  like  a  great  boulder  in  the  stream  of  progress,  making 
the  waters  lash  noisily  enough  about  him,  but  compelled  never- 
theless to  see  them  sweep  by. 

Yet  with  all  this,  Carlyle  was,  as  we  have  said,  a  great  moral 
and  tonic  force.  Every  line  of  his  writing  vibrates  with  moral 
earnestness.  His  imaginative  insight  was  in  itself  an  instru- 
ment of  revelation  to  the  less  happily  gifted.  He  not  only  car- 
ried on  an  effective  warfare  against  shams,  but  he  insisted 
equally  on  stripping  away  all  self-delusion.  He  made  men 
pause  and  see,  after  all,  the  limitations  of  their  vaunted  science 
in  the  presence  of  the  infinite.  He  reopened  the  springs  of 
wonder,  and  he  taught  that  wonder,  in  the  midst  of  boundlcis 
miracle  and  mystery,  is  itself  the  highest  worship.  He  declared 
that  idealism  was  not,  and  never  will  be,  dead;  that  spiritu:il 
forces  still  dominate;  that  the  Universe  is  not  a  machine,  but  an 
organism,  alive,  complex,  and,  above  all,  moral.  Out  of  this 
grew  his  constant  insistence  upon  action  and  his  doctrine  of 
duty.  Action  is  the  law  of  being  and  the  mainspring  of  right- 
eous life.  "  Doubt  of  any  sort  cannot  be  removed  but  by  action." 
"Not  what  I  Have,  but  what  I  Do,  is  my  kingdom."  "Blessed 
is  he  who  has  found  his  work."  For  not  happiness,  he  declared, 
is  the  goal  of  life,  but    blessedness,  and  blessedness   is  found 


RUSKIN  35J 

only  in  the  performance  of  duty.  "Do  the  Duty  which  He> 
nearest  thee;  thy  second  Duty  will  already  have  become  clearer." 
"Produce!  Produce!  Were  it  but  the  pitifuUest  infinitesimal 
fraction  of  a  Product,  produce  it,  in  God's  name!  'Tis  the 
utmost  thou  hast  in  thee:  out  with  it,  then.  Up,  up!  ...  . 
Work  while  it  is  called  To-day;  for  the  Xight  cometh,  wherein 
no  man  can  work."  Through  whatever  mists  of  transcen- 
dentalism or  clouds  of  error  and  perversity  it  come,  such  a 
clarion  call  as  this  finds  men  to  listen. 

John  Ruskin,  a  considerably  younger  man  than  Carlyle,  was 
;i:i  ardent  disciple  of  the  prophet  of  Cheyne  Row.     In  loyalty, 

doubtless,  to  his  own  Scotch  blood,  he  was  also  a 
John  great  admirer  of  Walter  Scott.     He  was  the  son  of  a 

7<i/9-r9f}0     prosperous  London  wine  merchant,  who  had  married 

a  Scotch  cousin,  and  was  brought  up  in  and  about 
London.  His  whole  life  and  character  showed  clearly  the  results 
of  his  early  training,  which  was  a  strange  mixture  of  parental 
sternness  and  solicitude.  He  was  the  only  child  and  was  watched 
over — nursed,  one  might  almost  say — far  into  manhood.  Yet 
he  was  not  governed  by  love.  His  parents  were  no  more  loved 
by  him,  he  says,  than  the  sun  and  the  moon.  He  was  schoc.hnl 
in  absolute  obedience,  yet  never  disabused  of  the  idea  that  lie 
w:^s  a  precocious  genius.  He  had  no  plajmiates,  and  was  denied 
all  luxuries  and  even  playthings,  so  that  for  amusement  he  was 
reduced  to  studying  the  patterns  in  the  carpet  and  the  wall-jiaper. 
His  mother  was  a  strict  Calvinist  and  he  had  to  read  the  Bible 
daily,  with  Pope's  Homer  and  Scott  for  supplement,  or  on  Sunday 
the  Pilgrim's  Progress.  In  summer-time  there  was  the  pleasure 
of  travelling  with  his  parents  in  a  chaise  through  the  country 
regions  of  England  and  Scotland,  where  his  father  solicited  orders 
for  wines.  Such  a  discipline  was  sure  to  be  fruitful  of  both  good 
and  evil,  and  Ruskin  has  endeavored  to  trace  the  strands  of  both 
influences  in  his  delightfully  frank  autobiography,  Prwterita.  It 
is  at  least  easy  to  see  how  on  the  one  hand  he  should  have  grown 
up  with  a  love  for  literature,  art,  and  nature,  and  with  a  highly 


352  MISCELLANEOUS   VICTORIAN   PROSE 

developed  moral  sense;  and  how,  on  the  other  hand,  he  should 
have  been,  as  he  says,  "conceited" — independent  in  his  views, 
very  positive  in  the  expression  of  them,  and  strangely  unable, 
when  thrown  upon  his  own  resources  or  confronted  with  disap- 
pointments, to  adjust  himself  to  the  conditions  about  hira.  At 
the  same  time  no  view  of  Ruskin's  character  would  be  complete 
that  did  not  take  into  account,  not  only  the  rarity  of  his  genius, 
but  also  the  inherent  nobility  of  nature  and  sweetness  of  dispo- 
sition that  made  him  one  of  the  most  lovable  of  men.  He  never 
triumphed  completely  over  his  defects,  but  the  balance  in  the 
long  run  was  on  the  right  side. 

Ruskin  was  entered  as  a  gentleman-commoner  at  Christ 
Church,  Oxford,  where  at  the  age  of  twenty  he  won  the  New- 

digate  prize  with  a  poem  (four  years  before  Arnold's 
Art  Critic,     similar  feat),  and  where,  after  the  interruption  of 

two  years  travel  for  his  health,  he  was  graduated  in 
1842.  He  had  already  written  considerable  second-rate  poetry 
and  some  almost  first-rate  prose;  and  now,  with  a  consciousness 
and  definiteness  of  purpose  rare  in  young  graduates,  he  set 
about  a  work  which  was  to  prove  in  the  end  not  only  a  master- 
piece, but,  in  its  own  field,  fairly  epoch-making.  Two  events 
of  importance  had  prepared  the  way  for  it.  When  he  was 
thirteen  his  father,  who  was  a  lover  of  art,  had  purchased  a 
copy  of  Rogers's  Italy  with  vignettes  by  Turner  which  opened 
to  him  at  once  a  new  source  of  delight.  And  in  the  following 
year,  upon  a  tour  to  the  continent  undertaken  by  the  family 
with  the  intention  of  visiting  the  scenes  which  the  book  por- 
trayed, he  got  his  first  revelation  of  the  full  sublimity  of  mountain 
scenery  in  a  vision  of  the  snowy  glories  of  the  Alps  as  seen  from 
Schaffhausen.  He  was  filled  with  two  joys,  the  joy  of  nature, 
and  of  nature  in  art.  He  had  some  skill  in  drawing  and  he 
worked  hard  to  perfect  himself,  first  by  imitation  of  the  masters, 
and  then  through  the  independent  discovery  that  the  only  true 
method  was  to  copy  from  nature.  His  admiration  of  Turner 
steadily  increased,  until  he  came  to  the  conviction  that  Turner 


>JOIIN    IIl.NUV    Nkm-.MAN 

Thomas  Hbnby  IIuxlky 


Thomas  Carlvle 
.John  Ri:skin 


RUSKIN  353 

was  the  greatest  genius  of  the  age.  Turner  was  already  an  old 
man  who  had  followed  the  too  little  appreciated  art  of  landscape 
painting,  illuminating  his  fundamentally  faithful  sketches  with 
a  gorgeous  and  sometimes  extravagant  imagination,^ but  work- 
ing so  contrary  to  the  conventional  methods  of  the  schools  that 
artists  were  inchned  to  ignore  him,  while  the  general  public, 
though  dazzled  by  his  pictures,  did  not  profess  to  understand 
them.  Slowly  but  surely  Ruskin  formed  the  purpose  of  enlight- 
ening the  public  and  converting  the  artists,  not  only  on  the  par- 
ticular subject  of  Turner's  genius,  but  upon  the  whole  nature 
and  function  of  art.  His  father  made  him  birthday  presents  of 
"Turners;"  and  an  attack  on  Turner  in  Blackwood's  Magazine 
called  from  the  boy  of  only  seventeen  a  defence,  which  was 
submitted  to  Turner  himself,  who  in  some  indifference  sent  it 
to  the  purchaser  of  the  maligned  picture.  But  when  the  boy 
became  a  man,  he  returned  to  the  charge  and  in  the  year  1843 
a])peared  the  first  volume  of  Modem  Painters,  "  By  a  Graduate  of 
Oxford."  The  cause  was  not  won,  perhaps,  by  this  single  blow, 
but  a  sensation  was  certainly  created.  Men  awoke  to  a  realiza- 
tion that  here  was  one  of  the  freest,  freshest,  and  most  vigor- 
ous specimens  of  criticism  their  generation  had  known,  and  one 
of  the  most  beautiful  and  impassioned  pieces  of  literature  ever 
inspired  by  the  subject  of  art.  Moreover,  the  central  doctrine 
of  the  work,  that  art  is  not  a  conventional  thing,  but  always  an 
imitation  of  nature,  at  its  sincerest  and  best  when  the  imitation 
is  closest,  and  that  Turner  and  certain  other  "moderns"  were 
therefore  greater  landscape  artists  than  Claude  and  Poussin, 
did,  before  the  lapse  of  many  years,  prevail. 

Indeed,  Ruskin  followed  up  the  first  volume  with  four 
others,  though  the  last  was  not  published  until  1860,  some  years 
after  Turner's  death.  Meanwhile  he  had  become  a  constant 
visitor  to  the  continent,  drawn  thither  by  the  double  oppor- 
tunity of  studying  mountain  scenery  and  art.  Architecture 
began  to  engage  his  attention  and  he  interrupted  the  progress 
of  his  first  book  for  two  others  of  quite  equal  importance,  The 


354  MISCELLANEOUS   VICTORIAN    PROSE 

Seven  Lamps  of  Architecture  (1849)  and  Stones  of  Venice  (1851- 
53).  The  former  lays  down  certain  fundamental  principles  of 
building  and  illustrates  them  by  the  cathedrals  of  England;  the 
first  "lamp,"  for  instance,  as  one  might  guess,  is  Truth,  or  the 
simple  law  that  a  building  should  always  look  to  be  what  it  is. 
The  Stones  of  Venice  is  a  patient  and  enthusiastic  study  of  the 
moral  history  of  Venice  as  written  in  her  palaces  and  monu- 
ments of  stone.  Both — and  mark  here  the  romanticism  of 
Scott  in  a  new  and  wonderful  guise — were  filled  with  a  profound 
and  reasoned  admiration  for  Gothic  architecture,  which  had 
been  so  long  contemned  as  barbaric,  doing  for  it  in  the  eyes  of 
an  unregenerate  age  precisely  what  Modern  Painters  was  doing 
for  Turnerian  landscape  painting  and  kindred  arts.  Ruskin 
became  the  evangelist  of  a  widely  accepted  creed,  and  his  genius 
later  found  a  special  acknowledgment  in  his  appointment  for 
many  years  to  the  Slade  Professorship  of  Art  at  Oxford. 

But  before  this  last  event,  about  1860,  there  came  over  the 

man  Ruskin  a  profound  change.     His  theories  had  never  been 

without  a  moral  coloring,  a  point  in  which  his  dis- 

n  ,  cipleship    of    Carlyle    is    most   evident;    and    now, 

Reformer.         r         r  .... 

clearly  under  that   discipleship,   though   with   half 

of  his  life  already  behind  him,  he  determined  to  engage  openly 
in  a  moral  warfare.  He  had  arrived  at  the  conviction  that 
noble  art  itself  can  only  come  from  noble  life,  and  modern  life 
seemed  to  him  almost  hopelessly  deficient  in  ideality  and  spiritu- 
ality. He  became,  indeed,  so  possessed  with  this  idea  that  he 
became  sometimes  utterly  dispirited,  letting  his  works  go 
out  of  print  and  declaring  that  his  labors  had  been  in  vain. 
But  mastering  his  melancholy  as  best  he  could,  he  undertook 
the  ever  gigantic  task  of  social  reform.  Most  of  his  books  and 
lectures  from  this  time  forward  were  inspired  by  the  new  pur- 
pose. Unto  this  Last,  essays  contributed  in  1860  to  Thackeray's 
Cornhill  Magazine,  was  a  treatise  upon  the  elements  of  political 
economy,  more  sentimental  than  scientific,  which,  maintaining 
that  souls  are  the  only  real  forces  in  society,  taught  the  funda- 


RUSKIN  355 

mental  postulate  that  "  there  is  no  wealth  but  Life — Life,  includ- 
ing all  its  powers  of  love,  of  joy,  and  of  admiration."  It  was 
Carlyle's  cry  against  a  mechanical,  utilitarian  civilization, 
repeated  with  an  equally  passionate  sincerity.  Thus,  in  various 
ways,  Ruskin's  work  went  on.  He  delivered  lectures,  like  the 
popular  Sesame  and  Lilies  (1865).  He  undertook  practical 
experiments.  Oxford  students  were  set  to  mending  roads. 
Tenement  houses  in  London  were  conducted  on  a  model  plan. 
Even  street-crossings  were  kept  clean  out  of  Ruskin's  private 
purse,  as  an  example  of  what  should  be  done.  An  agricultural 
community,  the  Guild  of  St.  George,  was  established  upon  half- 
mediseval  and  chivalric  principles  and  largely  supported  by  the 
great  fortune  which  his  father  had  left  him,  while  a  long  series  of 
monthly  letters,  Fors  Clavigera  (1871-78),  were  addressed  to 
workmen,  setting  forth  his  Utopian  ideals.  The  work  was  not 
futile,  but  it  failed,  of  course,  as  all  such  idealism  has  failed,  in 
realizing  the  hopes  of  the  idealist.  Ruskin's  health  at  last  gave 
way  under  the  strain.  His  mind  became  clouded,  and  lie  with- 
drew to  the  beautiful  home  of  Brantwood,  by  Coniston  Water,  in 
the  Lake  Country,  which  in  1871  he  had  purchased  for  his  declin- 
ing years.  His  life  had  perhaps  never  been  wholly  happy.  His 
brief  marital  experience  in  middle  life  had  been  unfortunate, 
and  later  disappointments,  and  the  ridicule  with  which  his  opin- 
ions were  often  assailed,  intensified  his  loneliness.  But  he  had 
at  least  the  joy — blessedness,  as  Carlyle  would  have  said — that 
comes  from  earnest,  unremitting  toil,  and  a  consciousness  of 
lifelong,  generous  sacrifice.  He  died  in  1900,  and  was  buried 
in  Coniston  Churchyard. 

We  recur  to  the  early  half  of  Ruskin's  life-work  a*^  the  most 
significant  portion.     Upon  the  dogmatic  temper  of  his  criticism, 

and  upon  the  exaggerations  and  idiosyncrasies  that 
,,"     ..         impair   his   gospel   of   art,    we   cannot   stay.     The 

fundamental  teaching  that  art  must  follow  nature, 
not,  of  course,  in  slavish  copying,  or  mere  mechanical,  unimagi- 
native imitation,  but  in  the  careful  observance  of  the  laws  which 


356  MISCELLANEOUS   VICTORIAN   PROSE 

underlie  the  phenomena  of  nature,  whether  in  Hchen  growth  or 
mountain  structure,  is  a  teaching  which  few  will  now  question 
or  venture  to  disobey.  It  was  not  Iluskin's  alone,  but  he  gave 
it  new  authority  and  power.  More  particularly  his  is  the  ethical 
and  religious  teaching  that  art  and  morality  cannot  be  separated, 
that  true  art,  as  was  said  above,  must  grow  out  of  noble  charac- 
ter, that  it  is  testimony  to  the  artist's  delight  in  nature,  which  is 
the  handiwork  of  God,  and  that  it  can  arise  only  under  condi- 
tions when  the  artist,  be  he  the  humblest  workman  in  the  build- 
ing of  a  cathedral,  has  joy  in  the  work  of  his  own  hands.  How- 
ever inadequately  this  may  state  the  whole  truth,  it  is  essentially 
wholesome  and  inspiring,  and  the  sincerity  and  passion  with 
which  it  was  preached  have  not  been  without  avail.  Merely  as 
a  practical  outcome,  Ruskin  did  much  to  redeem  both  English 
art  and  English  social  life  in  the  middle  nineteenth  century  from 
the  tawdrihess  and  even  ugliness  that  then  prevailed. 

Besides  this,  moreover,  Ruskin  did  two  things  about  the 
value  of  which  there  can  be  no  dissenting  opinion.     He  followed 

up  the  work  which  had  been  begun  by  Cowper  and 
^  Wordsworth  in  poetry,  and  Turner  in  painting, — 

the  work  of  teaching  men  to  look  directly  at  nature 
with  appreciative  eyes.  His  love  of  art  was  really  subordinate 
to  his  love  of  nature,  and  the  beauty  of  nature  was  for  him  an 
end  in  itself.  Not  the  blossoms  for  the  fruit,  he  would  have  said, 
but  the  fruit  and  seed  for  the  blossoms  to  follow.  He  would 
almost  have  swept  away  the  traces  of  modern  civilization  to 
restore  the  sightliness  of  nature  undefiled.  He  had  a  passion 
for  mountains  and  clouds,  and  he  tells  how,  upon  his  first  ac- 
quaintance with  the  Alps,  he  felt  that  he  wanted  not  "sight  of 
any  thrones  in  heaven  but  the  rocks,  nor  of  any  spirits  in  heaven 
but  the  clouds."  Perhaps  no  one,  unless  it  were  Turner,  ever 
studied  these  particular  phenomena  so  constantly  and  lovingly; 
and  certainly  no  one  else  has  so  translated  into  words  their 
beauties  and  glories. 


RUSKIN  357 

This  leads  us  to  the  last  consideration — Ruskin  as  a  master 

of  prose.     Only  by  being  such  could  he  ever  have  accomplished 

what  he  did  in  spreading  abroad  his  gospel  of  art 
Master  .  . 

,  „  and  nature.     Men  were  often  won  to  reading  him 

of  Prose.  ,  ,  ^  *=      ^ 

by  the  magic  of  his  style  alone.  It  is  a  romantic, 
flamboyant  style,  with  little  of  the  classic  polish  of  the  eighteenth 
century  in  it,  but  with  most  of  the  rhetorical  splendors  of  the 
seventeenth  and  nineteenth  centuries  combined.  At  the  base 
of  it  is  the  noble  rhythm  of  the  English  Bible;  at  the  crown  are 
ihe  varied  virtues  of  writers  like  Hooker,  jNIilton,  Browne,  and 
Taylor.  Melodious  rhythm  and  profusion  of  imagery  are  almost 
everywhere  distinguishing  marks.  Ruskin  wrote  by  ear,  as 
De  Quincey  did;  and  he  must  be  read  by  ear.  Yet  with  all  his 
delight  in  alliterated  and  lyrically  modulated  phrases,  and  figures 
that  follow  each  other  in  endless  variety,  it  is  to  be  noted  that 
clearness  is  rarely  sacrificed  and  distinctness  of  sincere  purpose 
never.  Always  a  worshipper  of  art  and  nature,  and  a  believer 
in  human  love  and  divine  providence,  he  manages  to  inform 
with  his  fourfold  message  the  highest  triumphs  of  his  own  art. 
Take  this  panorama  of  a  day  as  viewed  from  an  isolated  peak 
of  the  Alps: 

"Wait  a  little  longer,  and  you  shall  see  those  scattered  mists 
rallying  in  the  ravines,  and  floating  up  toward  you,  along  the  winding 
valleys,  till  they  couch  in  quiet  masses,  iridescent  with  the  morning 
light,  upon  the  broad  breasts  of  the  higher  hills,  whose  leagues  of 
massy  undulation  will  melt  back  and  back  into  that  robe  of  material 
light,  until  they  fade  away,  lost  in  its  lustre,  to  appear  again  above, 
in  the  .serene  heaven,  like  a  wild,  bright,  impossible  dream,  founda- 
tionless  and  inaccessible,  their  very  bases  vanishing  in  the  substan- 
tial and  mocking  blue  of  the  lake  below.  Has  Claude  given  this? 
Wait  yet  a  little  longer,  and  you  shall  see  those  mists  gather  them- 
selves into  white  towers,  and  stand  like  fortresses  along  the  promon- 
tories, massy  and  motionless,  only  piled  with  every  instant  higher 
and  higher  into  the  sky,  and  casting  longer  shadows  athwart  the 
rocks;  and  out  of  the  pale  blue  of  the  horizon  you  will  see  forming 
and  advancing  a  troop  of  narrow,  dark,  pointed  vapors,  which  will 
cover  the  sky,  inch  by  inch,  with  their  gray  network,  and  take  the 


358  MISCELLANEOUS   VICTORIAN   PROSE 

light  off  the  landscape  with  an  eclipse  which  will  stop  the  singing  of 
the  birds  and  the  motion  of  the  leaves  together;  and  then  you  will 
see  horizontal  bars  of  black  shadow  forming  under  them,  and  lurid 
wreaths  create  themselves,  you  know  not  how,  along  the  shoulders 
of  the  hills;  you  never  see  them  form,  but  when  you  look  back  to  a 
place  which  was  clear  an  instant  ago,  there  is  a  cloud  on  it,  hanging 
by  the  precipices,  as  a  hawk  pauses  over  his  prey.  Has  Claude  given 
this?  And  then  you  will  hear  the  sudden  rush  of  the  awakened  wind, 
and  you  will  see  those  watch-towers  of  vapwr  swept  away  from 
their  foundations,  and  waving  curtains  of  opaque  rain  let  down  to 
the  valleys,  swinging  from  the  burdened  clouds  in  black,  bending 
fringes,  or  pacing  in  pale  columns  along  the  lake  level,  grazing  its 
surface  into  foam  as  they  go.  And  then,  as  the  sun  sinks,  you  shall 
see  the  .storm  drift  for  an  instant  from  off  the  hills,  leaving  their 
broad  .sides  smoking,  and  loaded  yet  with  snow-white,  torn,  steam- 
like rags  of  capricious  vapor,  now  gone,  now  gathered  again;  while 
the  smouldering  sun,  seeming  not  far  away,  but  burning  like  a  red- 
hot  ball  beside  you,  and  as  if  you  could  reach  it,  plunges  through  the 
rushing  wind  and  rolling  cloud  with  headlong  fall,  as  if  it  meant  to 
rise  no  more,  dyeing  all  the  air  about  it  with  blood.  Has  Claude 
given  this?  And  then  you  .shall  hear  the  fainting  tempest  die  in  the 
hollow  of  the  night,  and  you  shall  see  a  green  halo  kindling  on  the 
summit  of  the  eastern  hills,  brighter — brighter  yet,  till  the  large 
white  circle  of  the  slow  moon  is  lifted  up  among  the  barred  clouds, 
step  by  step,  line  by  line;  star  after  star  she  quenches  with  her  kind- 
ling light,  setting  in  their  stead  an  army  of  pale,  penetrable,  fleecy 
wreaths  in  the  heaven,  to  give  light  upon  the  earth,  which  move 
together,  hand  in  hand,  company  by  company,  troop  by  troop,  so 
measured  in  their  unity  of  motion,  that  the  whole  heaven  seems  to 
roll  with  them,  and  the  earth  to  reel  under  them.  Ask  Claude,  or 
his  brethren,  for  that.  And  then  wait  yet  for  one  hour,  until  the 
east  again  becomes  purple,  and  the  heaving  mountains,  rolling  against 
it  in  darkness,  like  waves  of  a  wild  sea,  are  drowned  one  by  one  in  the 
glory  of  its  burning;  watch  the  white  glaciers  blaze  in  their  winding 
paths  about  the  mountains,  like  mighty  serpents  with  scales  of  fire; 
watch  the  columnar  peaks  of  solitary  snow,  kindling  downwards, 
chasm  by  chasm,  each  in  itself  a  new  morning;  their  long  avalanches 
cast  down  in  keen  streams  brighter  than  the  lightning,  sending  each 
his  tribute  of  driven  snow,  like  altar-smoke,  up  to  the  heaven;  the 
rose-light  of  their  silent  domes  flushing  that  heaven  about  them 
and  above  them,  piercing  with  purer  light  through  its  purple  lines 


NEWMAN  359 

of  drifted  cloud,  casting  a  new  glory  on  every  wreath  as  it  passes 
by,  until  the  whole  heaven — one  scarlet  canopy, — is  interwoven 
with  a  roof  of  waving  flame,  and  tossing,  vault  beyond  vault,  as  with 
the  drifted  wings  of  many  companies  of  angels;  and  then,  when  you 
can  look  no  more  for  gladness,  and  when  you  are  bowed  down  with 
fear  and  love  of  the  Maker  and  Doer  of  this,  tell  me  who  has  best 
delivered  this  His  message  unto  men!" 

The  opulence  of  color  and  sound  in  such  a  passage  is  almost 
bewildering,  yet  so  much  warrant  for  it  is  seen  to  lie  in  the  sub- 
stance that  it  is  difficult  for  the  most  confirmed  admirer  of  clas- 
sical restraint  to  declare  it  a  flaw.  The  mastery  over  these  qual- 
ities at  any  rate  cannot  be  denied.  There  are  passages  in  Sir 
Thomas  Browne  of  a  more  concentrated  magnificence;  there  are 
passages  in  De  Quincey  that  roll  with  a  more  sonorous  elo- 
quence; but  no  other  English  writer  has  as  yet  shown  such  a 
sustained  command  over  gorgeous  color  and  melodious  cadence 
as  this  moralist  and  critic  of  the  Victorian  age. 

The  Oxford  or  High  Church  Movement  of  tiie  thirties  and 
forties,  which  has  been  described  as  among  the  events  of  national 

importance  in  that  period,  and  which  was  essentially 
John  Henry  j^  reaction  against  the  liberal  tendencies  of  philosophy 
tont   lonn     '^"^^  scicncc,  Icft  Its  mark  on  literature.     Particularlv 

was  this  true  in  the  case  of  John  Henry  Newman, 
one  of  the  most  spiritually  gifted  men  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
and  all  in  all  the  greatest  man  of  letters  to  adorn  theology  in 
latter  years.  Newman's  birth  took  place  at  the  very  begin- 
ning of  the  century,  but  his  intellectual  development  was  not 
rapid.  He  was  successively  a  student  and  Fellow  at  Oxford, 
where  he  early  consecrated  himself  to  the  Church.  In  1828 
he  was  appointed  Vicar  of  St,  Mary's,  Oxford,  and  with  his 
Parochial  Sermons  began  to  exercise  that  magnetic  influence 
which  was  so  long  to  be  continued.  A  journey  to  the  Mediter- 
ranean, during  which  he  fell  seriously  ill  was  the  turning-point 
in  his  religious  development  and  an  Assize  Sermon  preached  at 
Oxford  on  his  return  in  1833  is  sometimes  said  to  have  been  the 


360  MISCELLANEOUS   VICTORIAN    PROSE 

beginning  of  the  Oxford  Movement.  Newman  was  strongly 
attracted,  enchanted  indeed,  by  a  romantic  vision  of  the  Medi- 
aeval Church  restored  in  its  grandeur  and  power,  and  it  was  not 
a  very  great  suq^rise  to  his  admirers  when,  as  one  result  of  the 
strong  wave  of  ritualism,  he  withdrew  from  his  charge  and  in 
1845  united  with  the  Roman  Catholic  Church.  Several  years 
later  he  founded  an  oratory  at  Birmingham,  and  through  his 
numerous  sermons,  lectures,  and  writings,  became  one  of  the 
greatest  religious  forces  of  his  day.  In  1879  the  new  Pope 
Leo  XIII.  recognized  his  abilities  by  making  him  a  Cardinal. 
He  died,  full  of  honor,  in  his  ninetieth  year. 

Newman  was  a  voluminous  writer.  In  his  early  manhood, 
especially  during  his  voyage  to  the  Mediterranean,  he  composed 
many  beautiful  lyrics  and  hymns,  among  the  latter  the  univer- 
sally known  "Lead,  Kindly  Light"  {The Pillar oj Cloud),  perhaps 
the  crown  of  English  hymnology.  A  late  poem  of  considerable 
length,  The  Dream  of  Gerontius  (1866),  has  many  ardent  admir- 
ers. He  wrote  also  several  romances.  But  his  most  important 
works  are  the  prose  Apologia  pro  Vita  Sua,  or  Apology  for  his  life, 
written  in  answer  to  an  attack  by  Charles  Kingsley  in  1864,  and 
the  Grammar  of  Assent  (1870),  books  marked  by  great  subtlety  of 
logic  and  charm  of  style.  The  style  has  never  failed  to  com- 
mand the  warmest  approval  of  discerning  readers,  yet  it  defies 
illustration  within  the  limits  of  an  extract,  and  almost  defies 
description.  Terse,  packed  phrases  like  "  Great  things  are  done 
by  devotion  to  one  idea,"  or  "Calculation  never  made  a  hero," 
are  the  exception  rather  than  the  rule.  The  style  is  leisurely 
and  insinuating,  not  startling  or  arresting.  There  are  none 
of  the  contortions  of  Carlyle,  and  even  little  of  the  color  and 
ornament  of  Ruskin.  It  is  a  style  that  achieves  greatness  by 
lucidity  and  ease,  by  giving  attention  to  the  matter  first  and  to 
the  form  apparently  not  at  all.  Such  a  style  becomes  com- 
pelling only  in  the  mass,  and  that  is  why  the  circle  of  those  who 
really  appreciate  Newman  is  comparatively  limited.  Yet  its 
pervasive  influence  has  spread  widely,  and  the  style  must  be 


ARNOLD  361 

acfounted,  with  Macaulay's,  among  the  important  agents  in  the 
formation  of  the  efficient  nineteenth-century  prose.  With  it, 
too,  go  in  this  case  the  authority  of  an  imaginative  seeker  for 
truth,  and  the  charm  of  a  dignified  and  gracious  personaHty. 

Matthew  Arnold  has  already  been  treated  among  the  Vic- 
torian poets.  But  Arnold  shares  with  Milton,  Dryden,  Landor, 
and  a  few  others,  the  distinction  of  having  written 
Matthew  ^f,'it]\  almost  equal  success  in  verse  and  prose.  In- 
p  deed  his  prose,  though  written  after  his  best  poetry, 

Writer  and  ^^^^  attracted  general  attention  to  him,  and  his  popu- 
Critic.  lar  reputation  still  rests  chiefly  upon  it.     Moreover 

his  prose  is  so  different  from  his  verse,  being  for  the 
most  part  as  jaunty  as  that  is  melancholy  and  introspective,  and 
pitched  as  low  in  style  as  that  is  high,  that  the  two  coiild  not  well 
be  brought  into  the  same  focus. 

His  career  as  a  prose  writer  virtually  began  with  his  appoint- 
ment as  Professor  of  Poetry  at  Oxford.  He  delivered  there  a 
series  of  lectures  On  Translating  Homer  (1861),  in  which  he  set 
forth  with  remarkable  clearness  and  insight  the  principles  on 
which  a  translation  of  Homer  should  be  founded,  showing  how 
Chapman  had  failed  for  want  of  Homer's  simplicity  of  thought. 
Pope  for  want  of  his  plainness  of  style,  Cowper  for  want  of 
his  rapidity,  and  Francis  Newman  (Cardinal  Newman's  brother) 
for  want  of  his  dignity  and  nobility.  In  the  same  lectures  he 
made  a  number  of  generalizations  on  style  that  clearly  marked 
him  as  among  the  keenest  and  surest  of  literary  critics.  From 
that  time  on  his  critical  work  was  broadened  to  include  many 
subjects,  frequently  recurring  to  literature  and  education  in 
their  various  phases,  as  in  the  lectures  Ori  the  Study  of  Celtic 
Literature  (1867),  or  entering  upon  theological  discussion,  as  in 
Literature  and  Dogma  (1873),  and  God  and  the  Bible  (1875),  or 
attacking  the  larger  problems  of  society,  as  in  Culture  and  An- 
archy (1869),  Friendship's  Garland  (1871),  and  the  lecture  on 
"Numbers"  in  Discourses  in  America  (1885).     His  most  impor- 


362  MISCELLANEOUS  VICTORIAN   PROSE 

tant  work  of  this  sort  is  to  he  found  in  Culture  and  Anarchy 
and  the  two  series  of  Essay. t  in  Criiirvim  (1865,  1888). 

Of  Arnold's  prose  style  little  requires  to  be  said.  It  is  easy, 
conversational,  almost  wholly  devoid  of  ornament.  While  he 
was  a  very  free  lance  in  the  critical  field,  his  method  was  never 
slashing.  He  does  not  thunder  with  the  voice  of  Carlyle,  nor 
chide  with  that  of  Ruskin.  He  is  master  of  a  very  keen  yet 
playful  irony,  always  keeping  his  temper  and  appearing  polite 
and  urbane.  Without  making  any  boast  of  logic,  he  is  precise, 
orderly,  and  above  all  lucid.  One  never  fails  to  get  his  idea 
and  his  point  of  view.  This  clearness  is  usually  secured  by 
reducing  each  idea  to  a  very  definite  phrase  or  formula — such 
as  "to  see  things  as  they  are,"  "poetry  a  criticism  of  life,"  "to 
live  in  the  spirit" — and  repeating  it  without  variation.  The 
constant  repetition  becomes  a  displeasing  mannerism,  but  it 
accomplishes  its  purpose  most  effectively.  Disraeli  said  that 
one  of  Arnold's  greatest  feats  consisted  in  launching  phrases. 

In  literary  criticism,  Arnold  employs  much  the  same  method 
as  the  French  critic,  Sainte-Beuve.  He  refuses  to  pass  judgment 
in  an  arbitrary  assertion  of  opinion  or  personal  taste,  but  en- 
deavors to  set  up  universal  standards.  In  "The  Study  of 
Poetry,"  for  instance,  he  maintains  that  there  is  a  personal  esti- 
mate of  poetry  which  is  false,  and  a  historical  estimate  which  is 
false;  what  is  desired  is  to  get  at  the  real  estimate.  And  he 
goes  at  once  to  what  is  universally  admitted  to  be  the  highest  in 
poetry — to  Homer  and  Dante  and  Shakespeare — and  uses  pas- 
sages from  their  writings  as  "touchstones"  by  which  to  test  the 
value  of  whatever  may  be  set  beside  them.  Moreover,  he 
looks  carefully  at  each  writer's  relation  to  his  time  and  place, 
and  particularly  at  what  the  writer  specifically  aimed  to  do, 
judging  him  by  his  measure  of  success  in  that  aim.  By  such 
cautious  methods,  though  he  did  not  wholly  escape  dogmatism, 
he  won  almost  universal  respect  for  his  sanity  and  freedom 
from  prejudice,  and  to-day  few  critical  dicta  are  quoted  with 
more  confidence  than  his. 


ARNOLD  363 

In  theological  and  religious  matters,  Arnold  was  less  felicit- 
ous. His  tendency  toward  precise  definition — he  speaks  of 
religion  as  "morality  touched  with  emotion,"  and  of  God  as  a 
"tendency  not  ourselves  that  makes  for  righteousness," — could 
not,  in  such  essentially  indefinable  things,  lead  to  much  satis- 
faction. But  in  the  social  field,  he  approved  himself  again  a 
critic  of  the  highest  merit.  He  took  upon  himself  the  special 
task  of  inculcating  among  the  English  people  greater  intelligence, 
or  at  least  of  emphasizing  the  need  for  it.  He  saw  too  much 
"Philistinism"  in  British  society,  and  too  much  "Hebraism" 
in  the  British  temper.  By  the  former  he  meant  a  narrow- 
minded  concern  for  material  things — -for  coal  mines,  great 
navies,  commerce,  wealth,  physical  comfort — and  a  correspond- 
ing indilFerence  to  the  things  of  the  mind.  By  Hebraism,  he 
meant  a  Hebraic  and  sometimes  unbalanced  passion  for  doing 
right,  for  putting  conduct  above  knowledge.  Carlyle  was 
preaching  something  very  like  this  Hebraism,  and  the  thing 
is,  of  course,  good  when  properly  tempered.  But  Carlyle,  with 
his  exaggeration  and  unreasonableness,  illustrated  precisely  the 
danger  in  it  which  Arnold  was  deprecating.  The  important 
thing,  said  Arnold,  is  to  see  first  of  all  what  is  right,  to  have  more 
criticism,  more  flexibility,  a  freer  play  of  mind — to  have,  in 
short,  to  use  a  phrase  which  he  got  from  Swift's  Battle  of  the 
Books,  more  "sweetness  and  light."  The  French,  he  said, 
might  need  more  of  the  passion  for  doing  right;  what  the  English 
particularly  needed  was  more  of  the  Hellenistic  passion  for  beauty 
and  truth.  In  all  this,  he  was  simply  pleading  for  a  more  com- 
plete and  balanced  development  of  all  the  human  powers,  for 
what  he  called  culture,  or  the  study  of  perfection,  in  which 
Hebraism  and  Hellenism  meet. 

"But  there  is  of  culture  another  view,  in  which  not  solely  the 
scientific  passion,  the  sheer  desire  to  see  things  as  they  are,  natural 
and  proper  in  an  intelligent  being,  appears  as  the  ground  of  it.  There 
is  a  view  in  which  all  the  love  of  our  neighbour,  the  impulses  towards 
action,  help,  and  beneficence,  the  desire  for  removing  human  error, 


364  MISCELLANEOUS   VICTORIAN   PROSE 

clearing  human  confusion,  and  diminishing  human  misery,  the  noble 
aspiration  to  leave  the  world  better  and  happier  than  we  found  it, 
— motives  eminently  such  as  are  called  social,— come  in  as  part  of 
the  grounds  of  culture,  and  the  main  and  pre-eminent  part.  Culture 
is  then  properly  described  not  as  having  its  origin  in  curiosity,  but 
as  having  its  origin  in  the  love  of  perfection ;  it  is  a  study  of  perfection. 
It  moves  by  the  force,  not  merely  or  primarily  of  the  scientific  pas- 
sion for  pure  knowledge,  but  also  of  the  moral  and  social  passion  for 
doing  good." 

This  kind  of  exhortation,  so  different  in  both  manner  and  aim 
from  that  of  the  more  romantically  tempered  Carlyle  and  Rus- 
kin,  was  not  calculated  to  reach  the  masses  very  directly.  In- 
deed, to  be  able  to  read  Matthew  ArnoUl  at  all  presupposes  a 
somewhat  severe  intellectual  training.  Yet  his  ideas  have 
become  very  widely  disseminated,  and  to  be  able  to  employ 
intelligently  the  dozens  of  phrases  which  he  made  current,  is 
to-day  one  of  the  tests  of  that  culture  which  is  based  upon  a 
familiarity  with  "the  best  that  is  known  and  thought  in  the 
world." 

In  the  field  of  history  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  century 
had,   besides   Macaulay   and   Carlyle,    a   number   of   eminent 

writers.  The  most  trustworthy,  probably,  and  at 
James  ^^le   same   time   the   one   possessed    of   the   largest 

t,       ,  historic    grasp,    was    Edward    Augustus    Freeman, 

1818-1894.    author  of    The  History  of  the  Norman  Conquest. 

But  a  far  more  brilliant  man,  from  a  literary  point 
of  view,  was  Freeman's  implacably  hated  rival,  James  Anthony 
Froude.  Froude  was  a  student  and  Fellow  at  Oxford,  and  for 
a  time  a  follower  of  Newman.  But  he  soon  completely  recanted 
his  High  Church  profession  and  left  the  University.  He  be- 
came later  a  friend  of  Carlyle,  and,  after  Carlyle's  death  hij 
literary  executor  and  biographer.  His  great  work  is  the  minute 
History  of  England  from  the  Fall  of  Wolsey  to  the  Defeat  of  the 
Armada  in  twelve  volumes  (1856-1870).  Next  to  this  are  a 
number  of  Short  Studies  on  Great  Subjects  and  two  monographs, 
John   Bunyan    (1878)    and    Julius    Cwsar    (1879).     Froude's 


SPENCER  365 

inaccuracy  and  partisanship  are  notorious.  But  no  English 
historian  since  Macaulay  has  been  so  popular.  Froude's  style 
is  even  better  than  Macaulay's,  being  equally  vivacious  and  yet 
simpler  and  decidedly  racier.  Moreover,  his  pages  glow  with  a 
feeling  and  an  imaginative  insight  into  heroic  character  that  are 
missing  in  Macaulay  and  that  are  hardly  to  be  found  elsewhere 
in  historical  writing  outside  of  Carlyle.  One  may  care  almost 
nothing  for  history  and  yet  read  Froude  with  the  liveliest  in- 
terest, so  potent  is  the  spell  of  his  romantic  picturesqueness. 

Two  philosophers  of  the  century  command  attention,  John 
Stuart  Mill,  the  empiricist  and  utilitarian,  and  Herbert  Spencer, 

the  agnostic.  Neither,  perhaps,  has  any  special 
Herbert  claim  to  literary  consideration  beyond  what  resides 

i^^n-t90'i     ^"  ^^^  lucid  expression  of  systematized  ideas,  but 

Herbert  Spencer  has  at  least  taken  an  eminent  posi- 
tion among  the  thinkers  of  modern  times.  He  was  virtually 
self-educated.  In  1855,  four  years  before  Darwin's  Origin  of 
Species,  he  published  his  Principles  of  Psychology,  based 
upon  the  principles  of  evolution.  Then,  in  what  would  ordina- 
rily be  regarded  as  middle  life,  he  planned  a  vast  system  of 
SyntJietic  Philosophy  (ten  volumes,  1862-1898)  which  he  for- 
tunately lived  to  complete.  In  this  work,  following  the  usual 
aim  of  philosophy  to  get  back  to  first  principles  and  find  unity 
in  diversity,  he  sought  to  apply  the  current  investigations  of 
science,  and  particularly  the  theory  of  evolution,  to  the  solution 
of  the  whole  range  of  our  intellectual  and  social  problems, — 
with  what  success,  the  future  will  have  to  determine.  He  is 
more  popularly  known  through  certain  of  his  detached  essays, 
such  as  the  fairly  familiar  Philosophy  of  Style. 

The  survey  of  this  era  would  scarcely  be  complete  without 
mention  of  some  representative  of  physical  science  itself,  which 
has  left  so  deep  a  mark  on  the  century.  Fortunately,  literature 
had  such  a  representative  in  Thomas  Henry  Huxley,  who,  though 
the  author  of  no  such  epochmaking  work  as  Darwin's  Origin 
of  Species,  stands  perhaps  only  second  to  Darwin  among  late 


366  MISCELLANEOUS   VICTORIAN   PROSE 

English  scientists  and  certainly  before  him  as  a  man  of  letters. 
Huxley  began  with  the  study  of  anatomy  and  surgery,  and  finally 
developed  into  a  biologist  in  the  broadest  meaning 
Thomas         ^f  ^jjg  term.     Indeed,  his  researches  were  extended 
cnri/  .^^^  almost  every  branch  of  science.     He  espoused 

1825-1895  Darwin's  theory  of  natural  selection,  and  with  pas- 
sionate earnestness  of  conviction  and  perhaps  some 
inherent  fondness  for  controversy,  took  every  opportunity  to 
impress  his  views  upon  the  public  and  extend  the  acceptance 
of  the  new  doctrines.  He  urged  in  particular  the  teaching  of 
science  in  the  schools.  His  first  work  to  attract  attention  was 
his  Evidence  as  to  Man's  Place  in  Nature  (1863).  Among  later 
volumes  of  importance  was  his  Lay  Sermons,  Addresses,  and 
Reviews  (1870).  His  essays  are  now  collected  in  nine  volumes. 
Huxley's  style  was  energetic,  like  the  man, — trenchant  and 
vivid,  admirably  suited  to  the  purpose  it  had  to  serve,  though  it 
would  probably  have  proved  more  effective  in  the  end  had  it 
possessed  something  of  Matthew  Arnold's  milder  tone.  But 
Huxley  had  a  difficult  battle  to  wage,  both  with  the  forces  that 
arrayed  themselves  against  Arnold's  gospel  of  culture,  and  to 
some  extent  with  the  forces  which  Arnold  himself  represented. 
Upon  the  former,  the  "Philistines,"  he  spends  his  sharpest 
sarcasm: 

"I  have  used  the  past  tense  in  speaking  of  the  practical  men — 
for  although  they  were  very  formidable  thirty  years  ago,  I  am  not 
sure  that  the  pure  species  has  not  been  extirpated.  In  fact,  so  far 
as  mere  argument  goes,  they  have  been  subjected  to  such  a  fire  from 
the  nether  world  that  it  is  a  miracle  if  any  have  escaped.  But  I 
have  remarked  that  your  typical  practical  man  has  an  unexpected 
resemblance  to  one  of  Milton's  angels.  His  spiritual  wounds  such  as 
are  inflicted  by  logical  weapons,  may  be  as  deep  as  a  well  and  as  wide 
as  a  church-door,  but  beyond  shedding  a  few  drops  of  ichor,  celestial 
or  otherwise,  he  is  no  whit  the  worse." 

But  when  he  finds  fault  with  the  assumption  that  in  the  study 
of  literature  and  the  humanities  is  to  be  found  the  best  criticism 
of  life,  and  pleads  for  the  equal  recognition  of  scientific  study, 


HUXLEY  367 

he  takes  a  more  carefully  argumentative,  though  never  less  con- 
fident, tone: 

"The  notions  of  the  beginning  and  the  end  of  the  world  enter- 
tained by  our  forefathers  are  no  longer  credible.  It  is  very  certain 
that  the  earth  is  not  the  chief  body  in  the  material  universe,  and  that 
the  world  is  not  subordinated  to  man's  use.  It  is  even  more  certain 
that  nature  is  the  expression  of  a  definite  order  with  which  nothing 
interferes,  and  that  the  chief  business  of  mankind  is  to  learn  that 
order  and  govern  themselves  accordingly.  Moreover  this  scientific 
criticism  of  life  presents  itself  to  us  with  dififerent  credentials 
from  any  other.  It  appeals  not  to  authority,  nor  to  what  anybody 
may  have  thought  or  said,  but  to  nature.  It  admits  that  all  our 
interpretations  of  natural  fact  are  more  or  less  imperfect  and  sym- 
bolic, and  bids  the  learner  seek  for  truth  not  among  words  but  among 
things.  It  warns  us  that  the  assertion  which  outstrips  evidence  is 
not  only  a  blunder  but  a  crime.  The  purely  classical  education 
advocated  by  the  representatives  of  the  Humanists  in  our  day,  gives 
no  inkling  of  all  this." 

Solidly  grounded  in  his  patiently  acquired  facts,  preaching  a 
profounder  reverence  for  truth  than  was  possible  before  the 
advent  of  modern  science,  and  equipped,  as  these  quotations 
show,  with  no  mean  literary  ability,  Iluxley  entered  the  arena 
of  nineteenth-century  thought  and,  to  the  honor  of  both  science 
and  letters,  carried  off  some  of  its  proudest  laurels. 


CHAPTER  XXI 

THE    LATER   VICTORIANS 

1860-1900 

IIOSSETTI     MOUBIS     SWINBURNE     PATEB     STEVENSON 

The  literature  of  tlie  latter  part  of  the  nineteenth  century 
scarcely  followed  the  line  of  development  that,  from  the  charac- 
ter of  the  period,  might  have  been  expected.  Huxley  and  his 
fellows,  for  example,  did  not  by  any  means  fight  all  the  battles 
of  science,  and  it  is  conceivable  that  their  cause  might  have  had 
a  fuller  vindication  in  some  modern  Areopagitica,  had  there 
been  a  Milton  to  pen  it.  But  science  soon  grew  too  busy  with 
its  discoveries  and  the  application  of  them  to  care  very  much 
about  battles  of  opinion.  Much  the  same  thing  was  true  of 
other  dominant  interests.  The  critical  spirit  continued  rife, 
but  this  spirit  seldom  ministers  to  creative  enthusiasm  in  itself 
or  in  others;  certainly  the  later  criticism  brought  forth  no  such 
celebrated  exponents  as  Ruskin  and  Arnold.  Perhaps  the  fic- 
tion of  the  time,  when  it  shall  be  possible  to  take  a  final  account 
of  it,  will  be  seen  to  have  been  in  many  aspects  typical.  It  hap- 
pens, however,  that  the  single  writer  of  fiction  w^ho  can  be  in- 
cluded in  our  present  treatment  was  as  thorough-going  a  roman- 
ticist as  any  that  lived  a  century  before  him.  Instead  of  carrying 
us  forward,  Stevenson  takes  us  back  to  Scott,  and  so  affords 
another  example  of  the  failure  of  letters  to  follow  closely  the 
main  currents  of  thought. 

Turning  to  poetry,  we  find  the  case  much  the  same.  Only 
negatively,  if  at  all,  did  it  express  the  intellectual  and  progressive 
spirit  of  the  age.  For  nearly  all  the  poetry  .of  a  high  order,  to 
leave  out  of  the  account  Tennyson  and  Browning,  who  still  lived 

368 


Dante  Gabriel.  Rossetti 
"William  Morris 


^Vlcjernon  Ciiarl,e.s  S>vinburxe 
Robert  Lovis*  Stevenson 


ROSSETTI  309 

and  wrote,  was  the  production  of  a  small  clique,  enthusiastic 
students  of  art,  in  whose  work  romanticism  continued  to  hold  its 
own,  surrendering  little  to  either  science  or  criticism,  rather 
indeed  recovering  much  that  the  middle  of  the  century  may  have 
seemed  to  surrender.  In  this,  of  course,  they  also  were  only 
maintaining  the  early  tradition  of  the  century.  Rossetti,  Morris, 
and  Swinburne  show  as  direct  a  descent  from  Coleridge,  Shelley, 
and  Keats,  as  does  Tennyson  himself,  and  an  even  greater  con- 
sistency in  their  allegiance.  If  there  was  any  intermediate  trans- 
mission of  the  tradition,  it  is  rather  to  be  sought  in  the  reactionary 
prose  of  Carlyle  and  Ruskin,  which  would  help  to  account  for 
the  pronounced  mediaeval  and  aesthetic  tendencies  of  the  "Pre- 
Raphaelite"  group.  These  are  matters,  however,  which  are 
best  studied  in  connection  with  the  works  of  the  poets  themselves. 
Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti,  the  leader  of  the  group,  was  born 
in  London  in  1828.  His  name  indicates  his  Italian  descent. 
His  father  was,  in  fact,  a  political  refugee.  But 
Dante  Dante    Gabriel    never    visited    his    ancestral    land, 

r,       ,,.         though   he  learned  the   Italian   language  and  was 
Rossetti,  ^  .  .  .... 

1828-1S82.  thoroughly  infused  Avith  the  spirit  of  Italian  litera- 
ture and  art.  The  Catholic  coloring  of  his  work — 
the  family  were  Protestant — is  likewise  to  be  accounted  for 
by  his  Italian  associations.  The  Rossetti  children  were  all 
gifted.  Christina,  the  youngest,  the  author  of  Goblin  Market, 
has  by  many  been  regarded  as  a  poet  not  inferior  to  ]Mrs.  Brown- 
ing, and  the  future  may  yet  accord  her  a  place  with  her  brother 
among  permanent  representatives  of  the  Pre-Raphaelite  group. 
Rossetti's  schooling  was  obtained  wholly  in  London.  At  the 
age  of  fourteen  he  was  already  started  on  his  career  as  an  artist, 
and  for  many  years,  indeed  almost  throughout  his  life,  he  wavered 
between  his  devotion  to  painting  and  his  devotion  to  poetry.  In  • 
1849,  he,  John  Everett  Millais,  and  Holman  Hunt  exhibited  each 
a  picture,  the  two  latter  in  the  Academy,  which  attracted  some 
attention.  The  pictures  bore  the  signature  "P.  R.  B.,"  which 
was   afterward   explained    to   stand   for   the    "Pre-Raphaelite 


370  THE   LATER   VICTORIANS 

Brotherhood."  The  name  was  not  a  very  exact  one.  They 
employed  it  mainly  to  signify  their  protest  against  the  conven- 
tionality from  which  painting  had  more  or  less  suffered  since  the 
influence  of  Ra})luicl  and  other  masters  had  been  dominant. 
They  desired  to  get  back  to  a  freer  spirit,  a  spirit  of  devotion  and 
enthusiasm  for  their  subjects,  and  at  the  same  time  to  observe 
greater  faithfulness  in  the  execution  of  details.  This  was  quite 
in  accord  with  the  ideas  Ruskin  was  already  proclaiming,  and 
when  Ruskin  learned  of  the  work  of  this  youthful  group  he  imme- 
diately exerted  his  influence  in  their  behalf.  The  three  artists 
developed  in  the  course  of  time  very  different  manners,  to  which 
it  would  be  impossible  to  attach  any  single  name.  But  the 
fervor  with  which  they  preached  and  illustrated  their  early 
faith  had  a  marked  effect  in  revivifying  English  art.  Rossetti 
and  Millais  both  came  to  be  among  the  foremost  of  English 
painters.  Rossetti  Avas  never  a  correct  or  patient  draughtsman, 
but  as  a  colorist  he  has  hardly  been  excelled  since  Titian;  and 
a  certain  aesthetic  manner,  seen  particularly  in  the  tyY><i  of  lan- 
guorous female  beauty  cultivated  by  himself  and  Burne-Jones, 
and  in  the  highly  imaginative  work  of  Watts,  is  one  of  the  dis- 
tinctive marks  of  the  later  Pre-Raphaelitism. 

In  1850  the  Brotherhood  published  a  little  magazine.  The 
Germ,  in  which  were  printed  some  of  Rossetti's  youthful  poems, 
notably  My  Sister's  Sleep  and  The  Blessed  Damozel,  the  latter 
beginning  with  the  familiar  stanza: — 

"The  blessed  damozel  leaned  out 

From  the  gold  bar  of  Heaven ; 
Her  eyes  were  deeper  than  the  depth 

Of  waters  stilled  at  even; 
She  had  three  lilies  in  her  hand, 

And  the  stars  in  her  hair  were  seven." 

A  conception  so  novel  as  this  and  an  execution  so  sure — though 
the  original  draft  was  somewhat  less  perfect— should  have 
showed  at  once  that  Rossetti  was  a  poet  of  a  high  order.  In  fact 
The  Blessed  Damozel  is  to-day  his  best  known  poem;  nor  is  it 


ROSSKTTI 


371 


difficult  to  understand  the  fascination  exercised  by  this  daring 
picture  of  a  woman  in  Paradise  possessing  all  the  physical  charm 
of  a  woman  on  earth  and  gazing  longingly  back  to  where  the  lover 
is  whom  she  must  still  await.  For  some  years,  however,  Rossetti 
continued  to  pursue  poetry  with  less  ardor  than  painting.  In 
1860  he  married.  In  1861  he  brought  out  a  volume  of  transla- 
tions, The  Early  Italian  Poets,  intending  to  follow  this  with  a 
volume  of  original  work.  But  his  wife  died  the  next  year,  and 
in  his  despondency  he  laid  the  still  unpublished  manuscript  in 
her  coffin  and  allowed 
it  to  be  buried.  At 
the  instigation  of  his 
friends  it  was  after- 
ward recovered,  and 
published  in  1870. 
With  that  date  Ros- 
setti's  poetic  fame  be- 
gan. He  even  thought 
then  of  abandoning 
painting  for  poetry. 
But  ill  health  and 
despondency  overtook 
him;  and  a  violent  and 
(|uite  unwarranted  at- 
tack upon   the   sens- 

'  I     ,   .  "tIIK  nLKSSKD  DAMOZKL." 

UOUS   character   of    his  (From  apainti»oby  Hoaaetti.) 

^-erse  partly  dispelled  his  enthusiasm.  In  his  struggles  with 
insomnia  he  became  a  victim  to  chloral,  and  his  poetic  pro- 
duction was  sadly  interfered  with.  A  collection  of  his  poems 
was  finally  made,  in  two  volumes,  in  the  year  1881;  but  by  that 
time  he  had  become  a  confirmed  recluse,  writing  almost  noth- 
ing, and  denying  himself  to  all  except  a  few  intimate  friends. 
He  died  in  1882. 

The  very  general  titles  given  to  Rossetti's  two  volumes, 
Poems,  a.ndBalladti  and  Sonnets,  a^oxd  about  as  accurate  a  classi- 


372  THE    LATEH    VICTORIANS 

fication  of  their  contents  as  can  be  made.  It  is  not  easy  to  select 
poems  for  special  comment.  Doubtless  The  Blessed  Damozel 
will  always  hold  a  high  place,  alike  for  its  originality  and  its 
air  of  sincerity.  A  Last  Confession,  the  story  of  an  Italian 
patriot  who,  partly  in  jealousy  and  partly  to  save  her  from  dis- 
honor, kills  the  girl  he  has  protected  and  loved,  is  a  powerful 
dramatic  narrative  in  almost  lyrical  blank  verse.  Dante  at 
Verona  and  The  Burden  of  Nineveh  are  loftier  themes,  treated 
in  solemn,  stately  style.  Jenny  likewise,  beneath  an  affected 
lightness  of  tone,  carries  an  almost  appalling  seriousness.  A 
single  image  in  it — of  lust  at  the  heart  of  the  world 

"Like  a  toad  within  a  stone 
Seated  while  Time  crumbles  on" — • 

will  serve  to  illustrate  this.  The  poem  [)resents  a  realistic 
pi(.-ture  of  London  life  very  different  from  Rossetti's  usual  work. 
On  the  other  hand,  The  Stream's  Secret  and  the  long  ballad 
of  Rose  Mary  are,  though  lesser  poems,  perfect  representatives 
of  his  naturally  romantic  and  symbolistic  method.  But  the 
best  example  of  his  romantic  art,  stripped  of  the  excess  and 
affectations  that  sometimes  mar  it,  is  to  l)e  seen  in  the  mediaeval 
ballad  of  Sister  Helen,  an  intensely  dramatic  portrayal  of 
"love  grown  hate  in  the  heart  of  a  woman."  Finally,  to  pass 
over  a  score  of  beautiful  lyrics  like  A  Neiv  Year's  Burden 
and  The  Sony  of  the  Bower,  there  is  the  series  of  one  hundred 
and  one  sonnets  entitled  The  House  of  Life,  each  almost  literally 
as  perfect  as  every  other,  and  all  touching  the  high-water  marj^ 
of  sonnet  verse. 

Rossetti's  poetic  manner  changed  considerably  in  the  course 
of  his  life,  and  there  are  many  who  prefer  the  naive  simplicity 
and  fresh,  healthy  tone  of  his  early  compositions.  Certain 
affectations  evidently  grew  upon  him,  as,  like  most  of  the  later 
poets,  he  began  to  cultivate  poetry  with  an  ever  intenser  con- 
sciousness and  application;  yet  there  is  never  any  taint  of  insin- 
cerity in  his  devotion.     His  imagination  turned  more,  an^  jnore 


ROSSETTI  373 

within.  All  the  wealth  of  color  and  form  which  an  artist  like 
himself  could  command  were  lavished  upon  the  pictures  of  his 
brain,  and  in  his  poems  as  in  his  paintings  there  is  a  mystic 
union  of  physical  charm  with  profound  spiritual  suggestion 
which  is  perhaps  the  keynote  of  Pre-Raphaelitism  as  wc  now 
understand  it.  He  constantly  visualized  things  which  are  to 
most  minds  abstractions,  giving  them  feet,  wings,  eyes,  and 
voice,  while  still  denying  them  the  attributes  of  flesh.  At  the 
same  time  his  music  deepened  to  a  quality  not  easily  traced  to 
ordinary  mechanical  devices,  an  effect  particularly  observable  in 
such  poems  as  Insomnia  and  The  Stream's  Secret.  Virtually 
all  these  characteristics  meet  in  the  sonnets,  each  one  of  which 
seems  the  very  quintessence  of  a  poet's  passion,  wrung  from  his 
heart  in  this  or  that  moment  of  ecstatic  love  or  brooding  sorrow. 
Take,  since  only  one  may  be  taken,  the  last  of  the  four  sonnets 
called  "Willowwood": 

"So  sang  he:  and  as  meeting  rose  and  rose 

Together  cUng  through  the  wind's  wellaway 
Nor  change  at  once,  yet  near  the  end  of  day 
The  leaves  drop  loosened  where  the  heart-stain  glows, 
So  when  the  song  died  did  the  kiss  unclose; 

And  her  face  fell  back  drowned,  and  was  as  gray 
As  its  gray  eyes ;  and  if  it  ever  may 
Meet  mine  again  I  know  not  if  Love  knows. 

Only  I  know  that  I  leaned  low  and  drank 

A  long  draught  from  the  water  where  she  sank ; 

Her  breath  and  all  her  tears  and  all  her  soul : 
And  as  I  leaned,  I  know  I  felt  Love's  face 
Pressed  on  my  neck  with  moan  of  pity  and  grace, 

Till  both  our  heads  were  in  his  aureole." 

Or  read  "Lovesight,"  "Without  Her,"  "The  Heart  of  the 
Night,"  "The  Monochord,"  "A  Superscription."  The  entire 
series  is  a  faithful  record,  "carved  as  in  ivory  or  in  ebony,"  of 
the  mysterious  conjunctions  and  oppositions  wrought  by  Love, 
Change,  and  Fate  in  the  House  of  Life,  and  it  marks  Rossetti 


374  THE  LATER  VICTORIANS 

as  being  in  his  own  mystic  fjishion  one  more  most  subtle  "asser- 

tor  of  the  Soul  in  song." 

The  account  of  Rossetti  given  .above  conveys  no  proper 

impression  of  the  force  of  character  which  in  his  early  manhood 

made  him  a  leader  in  the  new  {esthetic  movement. 

-,      .  Striking  testimony  to  this  force  of  character  is  found 

Morris,  "        .  i       ii-n-        ht       •      i  • 

1834-1S9G.    1"  "^^  ^"'^y  1"  which  vvilluim  Morris,  himself  a  man 

of  strong  personality,  fell  under  his  spell.  Morris, 
the  son  of  a  wealthy  merchant,  while  at  Oxford,  acquired  a 
taste  for  mediaeval  and  religious  art.  There  also,  he  contracted 
a  friendship  with  Edward  Burne-Jones.  The  two  even  shared 
certain  monastic  views  which  led  tliem  to  form  a  "Brother- 
hood" to  carry  on  a  religious  "crusade  against  the  age."  Aban- 
doning this,  they  joined  the  social  crusade  of  Carlyle  and 
Ruskin.  Then  Rossetti  came  across  their  path  and  made  one  of 
them  a  great  painter.  Morris  tried  hard  to  paint,  but  gave  it  u[). 
He  maintained  his  interest  in  art,  however,  organizing  a  company 
in  1800  to  engage  in  a  general  business  of  church  and  house 
decoration,  and  through  his  excellent  taste  and  tireless  industry, 
supported  by  his  wealth  and  business  sagacity,  he  practically 
revolutionized  the  decorative  art  of  his  time.  Later  he  became 
an  active  socialist.  He  is  also  celebrated  for  the  beautiful 
examples  of  t}j)ography  which  he  issued  from  his  printing  press 
at  Kelmscott  in  the  last  years  of  his  life. 

Morris  began  to  write  poetry  in  1855  and  was  surprised  to 
find  that  his  friends  regarded  it  as  good.  In  1858  he  published 
The  Defence  of  Giienevere  and  Other  Poems.  It  was  the  first 
regular  volume  of  the  Pre-Raphaelite  school,  and,  though  dis- 
tinctly original — in  no  sense  an  imitation  of  what  Rossetti  had 
done  and  was  doing — it  had  the  characteristics  of  the  school, 
an  atmosphere,  that  is,  of  devout  sincerity,  an  air  of  quaintness 
and  simplicity,  a  lavish  and  impressionistic  way  of  using  color, 
and  an  oddly  realistic  treatment  of  remote  medijeval  themes. 
It  would  be  easy  to  quote  passages  that  come  dangerously  near 
to  nonsense. 


MORRIS  375 

"If  I  move  my  chair  it  will  scream,  and  the  orange  will  roll  out  far, 
And  the  faint  yellow  juice  ooze  out  like  blood  from  a  wizard's  jar; 
And  the  dogs  will  howl  for  those  who  went  last  month  to  the  war." 

But  it  is  never  quite  prose;  and  certain  of  the  Lallads,  such  as 
The  Gilliflotver  of  Gold,  and  especially  the  longer  Arthurian 
tales,  have,  in  addition  to  their  romantic  glamour,  real  dramatic 
power.  However,  Tennyson's  IdylU  of  the  King  soon  showed 
Morris  the  uselessness  of  competition  in  that  field,  and  in  his 
next  volume.  The  Life  and  Death  of  Jason  (1SG7),  he  had 
recourse  to  Greek  legendary  lore.  This  volume  was  at  once 
successful,  and  Morris  entirely  abandoned  lyric  and  dramatic 
verse  for  narrative.  He  was  a  most  fluent  versifier,  and  he  set 
about  rewriting  the  legends  of  the  past  in  a  simple,  straight- 
forward style  with  no  other  purpose  than  to  please  by  the  in- 
terest that  inheres  in  the  tales  themselves. 

"Dreamer  of  dreams,  born  out  of  mj'  due  time, 
Why  should  I  strive  to  .set  the  crooked  straight? 
Let  it  suffice  me  that  my  murmuring  rhyme 
Beats  with  light  wing  against  the  ivory  gate. 
Telling  a  tale  not  too  importunate 
To  those  who  in  the  sleepy  region  stay, 
Lulled  by  the  singer  of  an  empty  day." 

Thus  he  proclaims  his  purpose  in  the  prologue  to  The  Earthly 
Paradise  (18G8-1870),  an  extended  series  of  twenty-four  tales, 
half  from  classical  and  half  from  north  European  sources,  which 
are  strung  together  somewhat  after  the  fashion  of  Chaucer's 
great  work. 

Indeed,  Morris  was  a  kind  of  modern  Chaucer,  endeavoring 
to  give  himself  up  to  poetry  with  somewhat  of  the  abandonment 
of  the  early  bards.  He  only  half  succeeded.  He  could  not 
quite  forget  "the  fever  and  the  fret"  of  his  own  age,  and  his 
lightest-seeming  verses  take  a  melancholy  tone  from  the  very 
fact  that  they  are  so  clearly  written  in  the  attempt  to  forget.  In 
his  Jason,  Orpheus's  song  of  triumph  runs: — 


376  THE   LATER  VICTORIANS 

"Men  say,  'For  fear  that  thou  shouldst  die 
To-moiTow,^  let  to-day  pass  by 
Flower-crowned  and  singing.'" 

This  pagan  creed  does  not  rest  lightly  on  a  child  of  the  nineteenth 
century.  But  Morris  manfully  did  what  he  could  to  brighten 
his  own  existence  and  turn  his  generation  away  from  its  over- 
serious  preoccupations  to  the  pure  delights  of  art  and  literature. 
His  mystery  play  of  Love  is  Enough  (1872),  his  translations  of 
the  Mneid  and  the  Odyssey,  and  his  fine  version  of  Sigurd  the 
Volsung  (1876),  had  the  same  aim.  So  also  had  the  seven 
remarkable  prose  romances,  written  in  an  invented  "  fif- 
teenth century"  dialect,  The  House  of  the  Wolfings  (1889),  The 
Roots  of  the  Mountains  (1890),  etc.,  with  which  he  completed 
his  literary  labors.  His  gaze  did  not  penetrate  beyond  the 
present;  he  saw  none  of  the  shadows  which,  in  Rossetti's  haunted 
vision,  men's  bodies  reach  over  the  "sunken  beach"  of  sleep  and 
death.  Simply  to  make  the  world  fairer  with  noble  deeds,  and 
death  happier  for  the  recollection  of  them,  was  his  not  unen- 
chanting  ideal.  And  thus  he  writes  of  Golden  Walter  in  The 
Wood  beyond  the  World: — 

"Now  of  the  deeds  that  he  did,  and  his  joys  and  his  griefs,  the 
tale  shall  tell  no  more;  nor  of  how  he  saw  Langton  again,  and  his 
dealings  there.  In  Stark-wall  he  dwelt,  and  reigned  a  King,  well 
beloved  of  his  folk,  sorely  feared  of  their  foemen.  Strife  he  had  to 
deal  with,  at  home  and  abroad;  but  therein  he  was  not  quelled,  tUl 
he  fell  asleep  fair  and  softly,  when  this  world  had  no  more  of  deeds 
for  him  to  do." 

It  fell  to  Algernon  Charles  Swinburne,  the  youngest  of  the 

Pre-Raphaelites,  and  the  latest  to  join  the  group,  to  attract  the 

first  general  attention  to  their  poetry.     The  son  of 

Algernon      Admiral  Charles   Henry  Swinburne,   he  was  born 

c    .  ,  in  London  m   1837,   and  was  educated  partly  in 

owinburne,  i  /^   i.      i  •  i 

18S7-  France   and   partly   at   Oxford,   leaving  the   latter 

place  in  1860  without  taking  a  degree.     Unlike  his 

associates,  he  did  not  study  art,  but  devoted  himself  from  the 

first  and  almost  singly  to  poetry.     His  early  dramas,  The  Queen- 


SWINBURNE  377 

Mother  and  Rosammid  (1860),  dedicated  to  Rossetti,  received 
slight  notice;  but  the  publication  in  1865  of  Atalanta  in  Calydmi, 
a  drama  modelled  upon  the  Greek  drama,  on  the  subject  of  one 
of  the  lost  plays  of  .^schylus,  excited  wide  interest.  The  drama 
was  dedicated  to  the  memory  of  Landor,  who  had  just  died  in 
Florence,  and  of  whom  the  young  poet  was  a  great  admirer. 
Perhaps  he  derived  from  him  something  of  his  own  Greek  tem- 
per. Certainly  the  Atalanta,  with  its  choral  passages,  its  sticho- 
mythia,  or  dialogues  in  alternate  lines  of  equal  length,  its  severe 
unity  of  theme,  and  its  tragic  fatalism,  reproduces  the  form  and 
spirit  of  Greek  drama  more  perfectly  than  anything  else  in 
English.  At  the  same  time  it  is  romantically  overwrought  in 
phrase  and  filled  with  color  and  music.  The  last  named 
quality  was  immediately  felt  and  specially  recognized.  Never 
before  had  anapaestic  metres  been  handled  with  such  ease  and 
intoxicating  effect,  and  there  is  perhaps  to  this  day  nothing  of 
Swinburne  better  known  than  the  lyrical  stanzas  of  the  chorus 
that  follows  the  invocation  of  the  Chief  Huntsman: — 

"  When  the  hounds  of  spring  are  on  winter's  traces. 
The  mother  of  months  in  meadow  or  plain 

Fills  the  shadows  and  windy  places 
With  lisp  of  leaves  and  ripple  of  rain ; 

And  the  brown  bright  nightingale  amorous 

Is  half  assuaged  for  Itylus, 

For  the  Thracian  ships  and  the  foreign  faces, 
The  tongueless  vigil,  and  all  the  pain." 

When  his  first  series  of  Poems  and  Ballads  appeared  in 
1866,  with  its  lyrical  dedication  to  Burne-Jones,  the  impression 
already  created  was  only  accentuated  by  the  severe  censure 
which  some  of  the  poems  called  forth  by  their  seeming  irrever- 
ence and  immorality.  The  collection  contained  not  a  little  early 
verse,  the  youthful  excesses  of  which  were  very  reasonably 
reprehended.  At  the  same  time  the  poet's  mastery  of  all  the 
resources  of  verbal  music  seemed  more  astonishing  than  ever. 


378  THE   LATER   VICTORIANS 

Readers  could  not  get  out  of  their  ears  and  memory  the  sound 
of  such  lines  as 

"The  sea  gives  her  shells  to  the  shingle," 
or 

"  In  the  greenest  growth  of  Maytime," 
or 
"Out  of  the  golden  remote  wild  west  where  the  sea  without  shore  is." 

In  fact  the  })oet's  technique  was  learned,  not  only  from  Shake- 
speare, Shelley,  Landor,  and  Keats,  but  also  from  the  Greek 
Sappho,  the  Roman  Catidlus,  the  French  Villon,  de  Musset, 
and  Hugo,  with  the  result  that  his  l;yTics  were  marvels  of  com- 
posite rhythm  and  intricate  harmony  which  the  whole  world's 
poetry  might  be  challenged  to  equal.  There  was  clearly  a  new 
note  in  English  verse  and  Swinburne  was  hailed  as  an  inspired 
singer  erf  the  first  rank.  His  fertility,  moreover,  proved  as  great 
as  his  facility,  and  from  that  time  to  the  end  of  the  century  at 
least  every  second  year  brought  forth  a  new  drama  or  a  volume 
of  odes  and  lyrics  from  his  pen.  A  Song  of  Italy  (1867),  Songs 
before  Sunrise  (1871),  Bothivell  (1874),  a  second  and  third 
series  of  Poems  and  Ballads  (1878,  1889),  Songs  of  the  Spring- 
Tides  (1880),  and  Tristram  of  Lyonesse  (1882),  may  be  instanced. 
Among  separate  poems  perhaps  A  Song  in  the  Time  of  Order, 
A  Match,  The  Garden  of  Proserpine,  Hesperia,  A  Forsaken 
Garden,  Thalassius,  On  the  Cliffs,  A  Child's  Laughter,  Ode  on 
the  Proclamation  of  the  French  Republic,  may  be  selected  for 
mention,  but  there  are  scores  of  others  equally  deserving.  He 
wrote  several  volumes  of  prose — Essays  and  Studies  (1875),  A 
Study  of  Shakespeare  (1880),  etc. — that  are  remarkable  for  their 
poetic  style  and  admirable  for  their  insight  and  generous  appre- 
ciation, though  seldom  for  temperance  of  judgment. 

It  is  clear  that  Swinburne's  expansive  genius  is  not  to  be 
defined  in  a  word.  He  is  another  eclectic  poet  like  Tennyson, 
responding  to  many  and  diverse  influences.  In  his  early  poems 
there  is  enough  of  the  mediaevalism  and  also  of  the  quaintness 
and  affectation  of  his  friends  Rossetti  and  Morris,  to  give  him 


SWINBURNE  379 

a  place  in  their  circle.  But  there  is  much  more.  Side  by  side 
with  his  experiments  in  Breton  ballads  and  English  Miracle 
Plays  are  odes,  narratives  in  couplet  rhyme,  rondels  and  aubades, 
sapphics  and  hendecasyllabics,  and  even  a  poem  (Laus  Venens) 
in  the  Oriental  quatrains  of  the  Rubdiydt.  He  is  at  once  more 
Greek  and  more  Elizabethan  than  any  modern  poet  save 
Landor,  and  he  is  half  a  dozen  things  besides.  The  Elizabethan 
quality  comes  out  strongest  in  his  dramas,  such  as  Chastelard 
and  Mary  Stuart.  They  are  closet-dramas  purely,  wanting  in 
action  and  comic  by-play;  but  they  have  the  great  dramatic 
virtues, — plot,  vivid  characterization,  and  intensity  of  passion 
in  tragic  situations,  presented  through  a  perfectly-handled 
blank  verse.  Tennyson's  best  work  in  this  kind  is  not  com- 
parable to  them. 

It  is  however  as  a  lyric  poet  that  Swinburne,  like  nearly 
all  the  poets  of  the  century,  is  to  be  finally  judged.  Into  his 
Ipics  he  has  put  all  his  own  character — his  intense  hatred,  like 
Shelley's  or  Landor's,  of  kings  and  priests,  and  his  passionate 
love  of  freedom,  of  little  children,  and  of  the  sea.  The  expres- 
sion of  his  republicanism  took  often  so  violent  a  form,  that 
though  at  Tennyson's  death  he  was  the  obvious  candidate  for 
the  Laureateship,  his  appointment  was  out  of  the  question. 
Many  of  his  best  poems  in  celebration  of  liberty  were  inscribed 
to  Joseph  Mazzini,  the  Italian  patriot,  and  still  others  to  Victor 
Hugo,  the  great  republican  poet  of  France.  But  his  republican- 
ism never  diminished  his  patriotism.  When  a  Russian  poet 
addressed  some  insolent  lines  to  Victoria,  the  "Empress  of 
India,"  he  responded  with  several  sonnets  upon  The  White 
Czar  in  scathing  language  for  which  anathema  is  but  a  mild 
word.  A  similar  intemperance  was  early  manifested  in  his 
proclamations  of  a  religious  faith  that  seems  often  candidly  and 
even  joyously  antichristian.  On  the  other  hand,  few  poets  have 
descended  more  gracefully  from  the  iieights  of  passionate  song 
to  celebrate  in  simple  and  musical  rhyme  the  innocent  charms 
of  childhood. 


380  THE   LATER  VICTORIANS 

"  No  flower-bells  that  expand  and  shrink 
Gleam  half  so  heavenly  sweet 
As  shine  on  life's  untrodden  brink 
A  baby's  feet  .... 

"No  rosebuds  yet  by  dawn  impearled 
Match,  even  in  loveliest  lands, 
The  sweetest  flowers  in  all  the  world — 
A  baby's  hands." 

But  these  qualities  pale  before  Swinburne's  master  passion,  his 
love  of  the  sea.  Childhood's  laughter  itself  does  not  ring  for 
him  with  the  joy  of  the  racing  waves  in  sunlight,  nor  the  wrath 
of  man  thunder  like  the  thunder  of  their  breaking  in  .storm. 

"Green  earth  has  her  sons  and  her  daughters, 
And  these  have  their  guerdons;  but  we 
Are  the  winds  and  the  suns  and  the  waters', 
Elect  of  the  sea." 

"Breathe  back  the  benediction  of  thy  sea,"  "And  in  thy  soul 
the  sense  of  all  the  sea,"  "My  dreams  to  the  wind  everliving, 
My  song  to  the  sea,"  "With  stars  and  sea-winds  in  her  raiment, 
Night  sinks  on  the  sea," — thus  in  ever  varying  form  and  tireless 
succession  his  stanzas  and  poems  close  with  this  magical  word. 
Nor  is  it  merely  a  word  to  conjure  with.  The  lyrics  are  per- 
meated and  saturated,  as  no  other  poetry  in  the  language  is, 
with  the  actual  sounds  and  scents  of  the  ocean. 

Against  these  virtues  must  be  set  the  grave  defect  of  the 
poet's  almost  fatal  fluency.  Matthew  Arnold  complained  of 
him  (though  somewhat  ungraciously,  in  view  of  Swinburne's 
generous  praise  of  Arnold's  verse)  that  he  used  a  hundred  words 
where  one  would  suffice;  and  the  complaint  was  just.  It  is 
true,  the  defect  springs  from  his  quality;  the  very  exuberance  of 
his  genius  is  one  of  the  great  things  about  him  and  a  cause  for 
admiration.  He  becomes  so  enamored  of  his  own  cunningly 
woven  beauty  and  music  that  nothing  can  arrest  his  progress. 
He  must  have  full  scope,  at  whatever  sacrifice  of  clearness  and 
vigor.     The  result  is  that  readers  with  little  of  his  whole-souled 


PATER  381 

delight  in  these  things  turn  from  him  in  despair.  At  the  same 
time  he  remains  a  splendid  example  of  the  poetic  temper  in  its 
extreme  development.  Nor  can  it  be  forgotten  that  in  the  one 
element  of  verbal  music  he  attained  in  his  very  earliest  attempts 
to  a  mastery  which  no  one  before  that  would  have  deemed 
possible  in  English,  and  which  is  likely  to  remain  long  unsur- 
passed. 

The  prose  writer,  Walter  Horatio  Pater,  though  not  to  be 
regarded  as  one  of  the  Pre-Raphaelites,  was  closely  allied  to 

them  in  temper,  scarcely  differing  from  them  more 

\  than  they  differed   from  each  other.     He  was  not 

p  ,  a  practitioner  of  either  painting  or  poetry,  but  he 

1839-1894.    ^^^  ^  rarely  sympathetic  student  of  both,  as  well  as 

of  other  arts  and  of  philosophy.  He  was  a  student 
at  Oxford  at  the  same  time  as  Swinburne,  becoming  later  a 
Fellow  of  Brasenose  College,  and  he  passed  there,  except  for  a 
few  years  spent  in  London,  an  unobtrusive,  almost  unnoticed 
existence.  The  attitude  of  remoteness  from  the  world  of  men 
to  be  seen  in  the  poetry  of  Keats,  Rossetti,  and  Morris,  was 
his  in  actuality.  One  of  his  earliest  pieces  of  writing  was 
an  appreciation  of  Morris's  Defence  of  Gueneverc,  in  a  style 
whose  coloring  was  not  unlike  that  of  the  poetry  appraised, 
"intricate  and  delirious  as  of  scarlet  lilies."  A  certain  morbid- 
ness of  taste  is  easily  to  be  detected  in  it,  as  indeed  in  the  whole 
of  the  "^Esthetic  Movement"  which  followed  at  this  time,  and 
for  which  Pater,  after  the  Pre-Raphaelites,  was  largely  respon- 
sible. But  Pater  was  never  guilty  of  the  excesses  and  offences 
into  which  some  later  disciples  of  this  movement  were  led. 
He  pursued  his  quiet  scholarly  life,  wTiting  slowly  and  with 
infinite  painstaking,  and  publishing  without  thought  of  notoriety. 
Hi^  Studies  in  the  History  of  the  Renaissance  (1873),  is  a  collec- 
tion of  critical  essays  upon  Leonardo,  Botticelli,  INIichael  Angelo, 
etc.  Mariiis  the  Epicurean  (1885)  is  a  kind  of  philosophical 
romance,  portraying  the  spiritual  experience  of  a  youth  amid 
the  conflicts  of  philosophy  and  religion  at  Rome  in  the  time  of 


382  THE   LATER  VICTORIANS 

Marcus  Aurelius.  Among  his  later  books  are  Imaginary  Por- 
traits (1887),  Appreciations  (1889),  and  Greek  Studies  (1895). 
His  best  known  separate  essay  is  the  autobiographic  Child  in 
the  House,  wTitten  in  1878.  An  extract  from  this  will  serve  to 
illustrate  the  general  tenor  of  his  work: — 

"■So  the  child  of  whom  I  am  writing  lived  on  there  quietly ;  things 
without  thus  ministering  to  him,  as  he  sat  daily  at  the  window  with 
the  birdcage  hanging  below  it,  and  his  mother  taught  him  to  read, 
wondering  at  the  ease  with  which  he  learned,  and  at  the  quickness 
of  his  memory.  The  perfume  of  the  little  flowers  of  the  lime-tree  fell 
through  the  air  upon  them  like  rain  •  while  time  seemed  to  move  ever 
more  slowly  to  the  murmur  of  the  bees  in  it.  till  it  almost  stood  still 
on  June  afternoons.  How  insignificant,  at  the  moment,  seem  the  in- 
fluences of  the  sensible  things  which  are  tossed  and  fall  and  lie  about 
us,  so,  or  so,  in  the  environment  of  early  childhood.  How  indelibly, 
as  we  afterwards  discover,  they  affect  us;  with  what  capricious  at- 
tractions and  associations  they  figure  themselves  on  the  white  paper 
the  smooth  wax,  of  our  ingenuous  souls,  as  'with  lead  in  the  rock 
for  ever,'  giving  form  and  feature,  and  as  it  were  assigned  houseroom 
in  our  memory,  to  early  experiences  of  feeling  and  thought,  which 
abide  with  us  ever  afterwards,  thus,  and  not  otherwise." 

The  two  things  which  give  Pater  distinction  are  his  philos- 
ophy and  his  style.  The  former,  at  least  in  its  earlier  expres- 
sions, is  very  clearly  a  kind  of  refined  Epicureanism,  or  hedonism, 
— a  doctrine  of  life  for  the  pleasure  of  life.  But  with  Pater  this 
is  not  quite  the  pagan  doctrine  of  self-indulgence  it  might 
seem.  For  he  possessed  the  best  qualities  of  a  humanist,  holding 
that  the  intensest  pleasure  of  life  springs  from  the  quickening 
of  the  spirit,  and  finding  for  himself  the  avenues  to  that  quicken- 
ing mainly  in  literature  and  art.  This  is  a  substitution  for 
religion  of  at  least  nothing  worse  than  sestheticism.  His  style 
might  be  expected  to  conform  to  his  philosophical  ideal;  and 
so  it  does.  It  is  highly  colored  and  musically  modulated,  and 
yet  never  so  highly  or  musically  as  Ruskin's.  It  obtains  its 
effects  by  less  obvious  means,  avoiding  the  old  or  common- 
place, preferring  whatever  is  subtle,  delicate,  and  elusive. 
Sometimes    it   seems    utterly   nerveless    and   effeminate.     But 


STEVENSON  383 

its  charm,  when  one  has  come  to   feel   it,  does  not   pall.     It 

is,  moreover,    perfectly  adjusted    to    the    expression    of   those 

things — such,  for  instance,  as  the  coming  or  going  of  bodily 

pain,  or,  to  take  a  more  specific  but  perfectly  typical  example, 

the   "particular  catch   and  throb  of  heavy  blossoms   beating 

against    a   window   peevishly   in   the   wind" — which   only   an 

abnormal  sensibility  like  Pater's  can  feel  in  all  their  gradations 

of  faintness  or  intensity.     It  is,  in  a  sense,  the  ultimate  note  of 

romanticism  in  nineteenth  century  prose. 

Robert  I^ouis  Stevenson,  a  slightly  younger  contemporary 

of  Pater,  was  a  WTJter  of  much  wider  general  appeal.     When, 

in  1870,  Rossetti  added  his  volume  of  poems  to  those 

Robert  ^f  j^-^  dJj^eiples,   Swinburne  and  jNIorris,   the  Pre- 

p,  Raphaelites   virtually   occupied   the   centre   of   the 

iiievenson,       .    ^  . 

1850-1894.  literary  stage,  A  short  time  sufficed  to  set  them 
more  clearly  in  their  proper  relation  to  Tennyson 
and  others.  But  every  generation  has  its  idols,  and  the  next 
reputation  to  leap  into  a  position  that  promised  permanence 
was  that  of  Stevenson.  The  position  has  indeed  been  well 
maintained;  but  though  the  death  of  the  author,  which  was  not 
unanticipated,  speedily  came  to  set  a  seal  upon  his  work,  his 
life  and  personality  and  all  the  conditions  under  which  his  talent 
flowered  are  still  too  near  us  to  permit  of  anything  like  final 
judgment. 

Stevenson,  baptized  Robert  Lewis  Balfour,  the  only  child 
of  a  distinguished  civil  engineer,  was  born  at  Edinburgh  in  the 
middle  year  of  the  century.  When  we  consider  that  Scott  and 
Carlyle  were  also  both  born  in  Scotland,  that  Ruskin's  parents 
were  Scotch,  and  that  Macaulay  was  Scotch  by  paternal  descent, 
the  share  of  Scotland  in  nineteenth  century  English  prose  is 
seen  to  be  almost  as  great  as  that  of  England  herself.  Steven- 
son's literary  bent  was  strong  from  the  first,  so  that  his  per- 
functory education  at  the  University  of  Edinburgh  and  his 
training  for  the  family  profession  went  for  nothing,  as  did  also 
his  preparation  for  the  Law  and  his  admission  to  the  Bar.    The 


384  THE   LATER  VICTORIANS 

romance  in  his  life  sprang  from  his  adventurous  and  Bohemian 
spirit  and  his  long  search  for  health.  He  travelled  a  great  deal, 
on  foot,  by  canoe,  and  with  a  donkey,  in  Scotland,  Belgium, 
and  France.  He  went  to  America, in  1879,  making  the  ocean 
voyage  in  a  second  cabin  little  better  than  steerage,  and  the 
trip  across  the  continent  to  San  Francisco  in  an  emigrant  train 
The  next  year  he  married  and  returned  to  England.  In  1887 
he  went  again  to  America  and  shortly  afterward  began  to  cruise 
among  the  picturesque  islands  of  the  Pacific.  Finally,  in  1890, 
he  bought  the  estate  of  Vailima,  situated  on  a  mountain-side 
in  the  island  of  Samoa.  There  he  made  his  home  and  entered 
upon  the  friendliest  of  relations  with  the* natives,  to  whom  he 
stood  in  some  sort  as  a  father.  Four  years  later,  though  his 
health  had  seemed  much  improved,  he  suddenly  died.  He 
was  buried  by  the  Samoan  chieftains  on  the  summit  of  Mount 
Vaea,  overlooking  the  harbor  of  Apia. 

Directly  out  of  this  wandering  life  grew  many  of  Stevenson's 
books — among  the  earlier.  An  Inland  Voyage  (1878)  and  Travels 
with  a  Donkey  (1879),  among  the  later.  Across  tlie  Plains,  In  the 
South  Seas,  A  Footnote  to  History  (all  1892),  and  Vailima  Letters 
(1895) .  Besides  these  personal  memoirs  he  wrote  several  volumes 
of  general  and  critical  essays,  Virginibus  Puerisque  (1881)  and 
Familiar  Studies  of  Men  and  Books  (1882),  some  poems,  particu- 
larly A  Child's  Garden  of  Verses  (1885),  and  a  large  number  of 
romances.  Among  the  last,  the  highly  romantic  and  sometimes 
blood-curdling  Treasure  Island  (1882)  is  best  known.  Others 
are  Prince  Otto  (1885),  Kidnapped  (1886),  and  David  Balfour 
(1893),  The  Merry  Men  (1887),  The  Master  of  Ballantrae  (1889), 
and  Island  Nights'  Entertainments  (1893).  With  the  exception 
of  Dr.  Jekyll  and  Mr.  Hyde  (1886),  a  study  in  dual  personality 
hardly  in  Stevenson's  manner,  his  romances  have  one  general 
character,  that  of  wild  adventure,  often  by  sea,  with  few  or  no 
female  personages  and  little  of  the  element  of  romantic  love. 

Stevenson's  wide  popularity  is  largely  due  to  the  fact  that 
he  was,  as  Pater  was  not,  a  man  of  the  world.     He  was  less 


STEVENSON  385 

concerned  with  the  subtle  impressions  made  on  the  sensitive- 
plate  of  the  mind  than  with  the  infinitely  livelier  impressions 
made  on  the  sensitive  retina  of  the  eye.  His  world  was  the 
world  of  action  and  events.  He  usually  had  a  story  to  tell,* 
and  this  alone  would  have  assured  him  of  a  large  audience. 
But  he  had,  in  addition,  the  faculty  of  telling  his  story  well. 
Indeed,  the  name  of  Stevenson  stands  in  literature  for  a  style 
quite  as  much  as  for  anything.  The  style,  he  tells  us,  was  a 
product  of  much  study  and  practice  and  of  the  imitation  of 
various  masters,  yet  with  all  its  artificiality  its  mechanism  is 
quite  concealed;  one  comes  to  know  it  without  knowing  how. 
It  shares  with  Pater's  the  quality  of  fastidiousness  and  avoid- 
ance of  the  stereotyped,  but  does  not  push  this  refinement  so  far. 
It  is  less  academic,  more  racy,  as  befits  the  very  different  pur- 
pose it  is  made  to  serve.  Though  difficult  to  describe,  it  is  easy 
to  illustrate,  since  the  flavor  of  it  lurks  in  almost  every  sentence. 
Take,  from  Travels  icifh  a  Donkey,  this  sequel  of  a  night  spent 
in  the  open  air: 

"I  was  soon  on  the  road  nibbling  a  cake  of  chocolate  and  seri- 
ously occupied  with  a  case  of  conscience.  Was  I  to  pay  for  my 
night's  lodging?  I  had  slept  ill,  the  bed  was  full  of  fieas  in  the  shape 
of  ants,  there  was  no  water  in  the  room,  the  very  dawn  had  neglected 
to  call  me  in  the  morning.  I  might  have  missed  a  train,  had  there 
been  any  in  the  neighborhood  to  catch.  Clearly,  I  was  dissatisfied 
with  my  entertainment;  and  I  decided  I  should  not  pay  unless  I  met 
a  beggar. 

"The  valley  looked  even  lovelier  by  morning;  and  soon  the  road 
descended  to  the  level  of  the  river.  Here,  in  a  place  where  many 
straight  and  prosperous  chestnuts  stood  together,  making  an  aisle 
upon  a  swarded  terrace,  I  made  my  morning  toilette  in  the  water  of 
the  Tarn.  It  was  marvellously  clear,  thrillingly  cool;  the  soap-suds 
disappeared  as  if  by  magic  in  the  swift  current,  and  the  white  bould- 
ers gave  one  a  model  for  cleanliness.  To  wash  in  one  of  God'a  rivers 
in  the  open  air  seems  to  me  a  sort  of  cheerful  solemnity  or  semi-pagan 
act  of  worship.  To  dabble  among  dishes  in  a  bedroom  may  perhaps 
make  clean  the  body;  but  the  imagination  takes  no  share  in  such  a 

♦  Tusitala  ( •  teUer  of  tales")  is  the  uarae  which  was  given  him  by  the 
Samoau  uatires. 


380  THE   LATER   VirTORIANS 

cleansing.     I  went  on   with  a  iiglit  and  peaceful  heart,  and  sang 

psalms  to  the  spiritual  ear  an  I  advanced. 

"Suddenly  up  came  an  old  woman,  who  point-blank  demanded 

alms. 

"  'Good!'  thought  I;  'here  comes  the  waiter  with  the  bill.' 
"And  I  paid  for  my  night's  lodging  on  the  spot.     Take  it  how 

you  please,  but  this  was  the  first  and  the  last  beggar  that  I  met  with 

during  all  my  tour." 

A  quality  seldom  to  be  dissociated  from  style  is  personality. 
The  personality  of  Stevenson  is  nearly  as  marked  in  its  way  as 
that  of  Charles  I^amb,  and  is  nearly  as  delightful.  "Extreme 
Inisijness,"  he  declares  in  one  of  his  essays,  "whether  at  school 
or  college,  kirk  or  market,  is  a  symptom  of  deficient  vitality; 
and  a  faculty  for  idleness  implies  a  catholic  appetite  and  a 
strong  sense  of  personal  identity."  In  this  sentence  he  has 
almost  summed  up  his  own  character — his  wide  curiosity,  his 
buoyant  spirits,  his  unfailing  good-fellowship.  Pater,  we  have 
said,  was  a  humanist,  but  so  was  Stevenson,  in  a  very  different 
and  more  vital  sense  of  the  word.  Few  men  have  shown  a 
heartier  willingness  to  "breast  into  the  world"  and  rub  off  the 
angularities  of  character  in  the  face  of  all  sorts  of  discourage- 
ment. There  are  those  who  have  suspected  something  of  pose 
in  this  disposition,  just  as  it  is  easy  to  suspect  a  pose  in  the  pre- 
ciosity of  Stevenson's  style.  But  even  if  we  grant  it,  it  would 
be  uncharitable  to  call  such  bravado,  so  infectious  and  salutary 
in  its  influence,  by  any  other  name  than  virtue.  Only  in  this 
spirit  of  charity  is  it  possible  to  read  the  beautiful  Requiem  which 
he  wrote,  and  which  is  now  engraved  on  his  granite  tomb: 

"Under  the  wide  and  starry  sky. 
Dig  the  grave  and  let  me  lie. 
Glad  did  I  live  and  gladly  die, 

And  I  laid  me  down  with  a  will. 
This  be  the  ver.se  you  grave  for  me:  ' 

Here  he  lies  where  he  longed  to  be; 
Home  is  the  sailor,  home  from  the  sea, 
And  the  hunter  home  from  the  hill." 


CONCLUSION 

From  the  seventh  century  to  the  verge  of  the  twentieth; 
from  semi-barbarous  Britain  to  Christian  England;  from  North- 
umbria  to  Wessex,  from  Wessex  to  London,  from  London  again 
to  the  forests  of  Nottingham,  to  the  lakes  of  Westmoreland  and 
Cumberland,  to  Ayrshire,  to  Edinburgh,  to  almost  every  corner 
of  the  island  kingdom,  and  finally  to  a  mountain  tomb  in  a 
far-away  island  of  the  South  Seas,  we  have  followed  the  literary 
record  of  the  English  race.  Through  all  its  changing  forms 
and  faiths,  certain  characteristics  have  remained  the  same. 
Through  Teutonic  paganism  and  Roman  Christianity,  through 
Norman  feudalism  and  Celtic  romance,  through  the  Renais- 
sance humanism  of  the  sixteenth  century,  the  Puritanism  of 
the  seventeenth,  the  deism  of  the  eighteenth,  the  mingled  indi- 
vidualism and  socialism  of  the  nineteenth,  may  be  traced  with 
remarkable  distinctness  those  traits  of  character  which  have 
shaped  the  ideals  and  destinies  of  the  people.  Among  these  are 
an  indomitable  will  and  courage  to  act,  a  passionate  devotion 
to  freedom  tempered  by  a  wholesome  respect  for  law,  a  religious 
regard  for  moral  purity  and  humble  worth,  and  a  genuine  love 
for  external  nature  in  all  her  aspects,  from  the  formal  beauty 
of  lawn  and  garden  to  the  rugged  grandeur  of  mountain  and  sea. 
One  and  the  same  spirit  informs  the  epic  of  those  early  unknown 
bards  who  chanted  the  deeds  of  their  fathers  by  the  stern  North 
Ocean  and  the  requiem  of  the  modern  singer  who  goes  to  meet 
death  among  tropic  palms. 

If  the  record  has  seemed  to  close  abruptly,  it  is  because 
there  is  no  real  conclusion.  It  stops,  but  does  not  end.  Even 
the  nineteenth  century,  in  its  literary  history,  is  seen  to  return 
upon  itself  like  a  cycle.     Not  very  unlike  the  romanticism  which 

387 


388  CONCLUSION 

marked  the  beginning  is  thai  whicli  attends  the  close.  The 
romances  of  Scott  find  a  counterpart  in  the  tales  of  his  coni- 
j)atriot  Stevenson.  From  the  dream-land  of  Coleridge,  now 
lighted  as  by  rainbows,  now  dark  with  mists,  the  step  is  not 
great  to  the  dream-world  of  Rossetti,  "  forlorn  of  light."  Words- 
worth's exalted  worship  of  nature  is  echoed  in  Tennyson's  more 
sentimental  love.  The  revolutionary  idealism  and  the  lyricism 
of  Shelley  reappear  in  the  republicanism  and  the  virtuosity  of 
Swinburne.  The  religion  of  beauty  promulgated  by  Keats 
survives  in  the  aesthetic  cult  of  a  school. 

But  even  thus,  not  all  the  story  of  the  last  century  has  been 
told.  There  are  moods  and  tendencies  not  accounted  for  here 
because  their  chief  exponents  are  still  alive,  or  because  tlieir 
significance  may  not  be  clearly  defined.  Sir  Leslie  Stephen, 
perhaps  the  foremost  of  the  later  critics,  has  just  passed  away, 
but  no  term  can  be  pointed  to  the  kind  of  activity  for  which  he 
stood,  and  which  appears  to  be  steadily  gathering  momentum. 
In  fiction,  two  divergent  tendencies  have  long  been  represented 
by  the  very  diverse  personalities  of  Mr.  George  Meredith  and 
Mr.  Thomas  Hardy,  the  one  a  satiric  psychologist  of  complex 
and  conventional  life,  the  other  a  tragic  realist  of  pastoral  fold 
and  furrow.  Others  might  easily  be  named.  An  entire  school 
of  Scotch  novelists  has  threatened  to  supplant  Stevenson;  and 
the  preciosity  of  Pater  is  undergoing  new  metamorphoses  beneath 
the  hands  of  Mr.  Maurice  Hewlett.  Perhaps  the  newest  note 
has  been  struck  by  Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling,  whose  virile  and  un- 
conventional tales,  brought  first  from  India,  are  like  a  fresh 
revelation  of  Britain's  imperial  greatness.  Mr.  Kipling  has 
proved  also  a  new  force  in  poetry,  restoring  to  it  a  barbaric 
energy  of  rhythm  and  preaching  a  gospel  of  almost  brute  strength 
and  courage.  He  has  left  easily  the  deepest  mark  on  the  rising 
generation.  The  more  academic  poetry  finds  its  foremost 
representative  in  the  meditative  muse  of  Mr.  William  Watson; 
while  ]\Ir.  Stephen  Phillips  is  cultivating  poetical  drama  with  a 
zea!  that  is  rewarded  both  in  the  study  and  on  the  stage.     Finally 


CONCLUSION  389 

there  is  a  determined  movement  looking  toward  a  revival  of  the 
Celtic  spirit  in  both  poetry  and  prose. 

It  is  idle  to  ask  whither  all  this  tends.  There  is  no  reason 
to  think  that  England,  at  the  beginning  of  the  twentieth  century, 
is  passing  through  a  period  of  any  great  literary  importance. 
Indeed,  there  is  reason  to  think  rather  the  contrary.  Periodj 
of  great  literary  importance  are  necessarily  few;  and  with  the 
Elizabethan  and  Georgian  periods  behind  her,  England  has 
standards  that  are  not  easily  reached.  Yet  the  great  achieve- 
ments with  which  the  last  century  opened  have  not  been  un- 
worthily followed,  and  though  the  present  may  seem  to  show 
deterioration,  it  w'ould  be  illogical  to  presage  decay.  The  out- 
look for  the  future  loses  none  of  its  promise. 


APPENDIX, 


391 


APPENDIX  A 


NOTES   ON  THE  LANGUAGE 
1.  DIALECTS 

A  CHRONOLOGICAL  CHART  OF  THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGB 

SHOWING  THE  RELATIVE  LITKBART  IMPORTANCE  OF  THE  SEVERAL  DIALECTS 


NORTHERN  DIALECT        MIDLAND  DIALECT 


(The  early  Northumbrian, 
spoken  by  tlic  Angles  of 
Northumbria) 


(The  early  Mercian, 

spoken  by  the  Angles  of 

Mercia) 


SOUTHERN  DIALECT 
(The  early  West  Saxon, 
spoken  by  the  Saxons  in 
Wessex,  south  and  west 
of  the  Thames) 


700 


Beowulf,  Csedmon, 
CyneWulf,  Bede 
(all  preserved  only 
in     the     Southern 
dialect) 


Alfred 
^Ifrif 
Chronicle  (Worcester) 


1100 


H  K 


Cursor  Mundi 


Chronicle  (Peterboro' ) 
Orm,  Layamou 


Chaucer,  Wyclit 
Caxton 


1500 


1900 


Duubar 


Ramsay 

Burns 

Scott 


Tyndale 

Shakespeare 

Milton 

Dryden 

Swift 

Johnson 

Burke 

Coleridge 

Tennyson 


Barnes 


There  was  also  the  Kentish  dialect,  spoken  by  the  Jutes  in  Kent, 
but  no  literature  has  been  preserved  in  it. 

The  Northern  dialect  is  now  represented  by  the  Lowland  Scotch. 
The  dialect  of  Tennyson's  "Northern  Farmer"  (Lincolnshire,  or  York- 
shire) is  an  extreme  North  Midland,  approaching  the  Northern. 

392 


DIALECTS  393 

The  Midland  dialect  became  in  Chaucer's  time  the  standard 
literary  English  and  has  remained  such  ever  since.  Even  Scotcii 
writers  like  Burns  and  Scott  employ  this  when  they  write  "pure 
English."  Old  forms  of  this  dialect  survive  still  in  rustic  speech, 
and  may  be  met  with  in  dialect  literature  of  the  Midland  Counties. 
See  the  quotation  from  George  Eliot's  "Silas  Marner"  on  pages 
340-41. 

The  Southern  dialect  may  be  found  in  the  rustic  Wiltshire  and 
Dorsetshire  dialect  poems  of  William  Barnes  and  the  Devonshire 
dialect  of  Richard  Blackmore's  "Lorna  Doone." 

One  general  diflference  between  the  Northern  and  the  Southern 
dialects  is  the  more  guttural  a  of  the  Northern,  in  which  7nan  is  pro- 
nounced more  nearly  man  or  ynon.  Another  difiference  is  seen  in 
the  northern  guttural  k  as  opposed  to  the  southern  ch:  kirk,  church; 
carl,  churl;  Lancaster,  Winchester.  (See  O.  F.  Emerson's  History  of 
the  English  Language,  ^  56.)  Still  other  differences  appear  in  the 
verb;  for  instance  in  the  Middle  English  period  the  inflection  of  the 
third  person  present  indicative  of  the  verb  was  as  follows : 

Singular  (O.E.  singeth)      Plural  (O.  E.  singeth) 
Northern  he  sing-es  they  sing-es 

East  Midland  (Chaucer)        sing-eth  sing-en 

West  Midland  sing-es  sing-en 

Southern  sing-eth  .sing-eth 

The  Northern  dialect  was  the  least  conservative,  rapidly  losing  its 
inflectional  forms. 

2.     INFLECTIONAL  CHANGES. 

The  Old  English  was  a  pretty  fully  inflected  language,  like  the 
German  of  to-day.  The  present  indicative  of  the  verb  was  inflected 
thus: 


Singular 

Plural 

1  sing-c 

sing-ath 

2  sing-est 

sing-ath 

3  sing-eth 

sing-ath 

The  transition  to  Middle  English  was  marked  by  a  weakening  and 
levelUng  of  inflections.  In  especial,  -en  and  -e  gradually  supplanted 
many  Old  Englisli  forms,  -en  becoming  the  regular  plural  ending 
of  the  verb  in  the  Midland  dialect.  To  became  regularly  attached 
to  the  infinitive;  and  the  modern  present  participial  form  in  -ing  re- 


394  APPENDIX 

placed  the  old  one  in  -endc.  The  old  grammatical  gender,  too,  by 
which  a  word  like  wife  could  be  neuter,  or  a  word  like  sun  feminine, 
gave  way  to  natural  gender.  Yet  another  important  change  that 
took  place  late  in  Middle  English  times  was  the  substitution  of  their 
and  them  for  the  old  her  and  hem.  (See  Chaucer,  and  compare  the 
modern  colloquial  "See  'em  go.") 

In  Modern  English  the  e  dropped  out  of  the  genitive  singular 
and  the  plural  of  most  nouns  and  the  third  singular  of  most  verbs, 
thus  shortening  those  forms  by  a  syllable.  The  preterite  -ed  also 
ceased  to  be  pronounced  as  a  separate  syllable.  Other  inflectional 
forms  were  mostly  lost.  (We  still  have  a  few  forms  like  oxen,  etc.; 
and  for  a  dialectal  survival  of  -en  in  the  infinitive,  see  the  extract 
from  "Silas  Marner  "  on  page  341.)  Inflectional  -e  final  became  en- 
tirely silent  and  was  generally  dropped.  The  pronoun  ye  became 
objective  as  well  as  nominative ;  its  began  to  appear  (there  are  ten 
instances  of  it  in  Shakespeare).  The  Northern  -s  third  singular 
present  indicative  encroached  rapidly  on  the  East  Midland  and 
Southern  -th. 

3.     THE   VOCABULARY. 

The  fundamentally  Teutonic  or  Germanic  character  of  the 
English  language  may  be  seen  by  comparing  a  few  simple  modern 
English  and  German  words: 


English 

one 

thou 

by 

and 

home 

good 

help 

German 

ein 

du 

bei 

und 

heim 

gut 

helfen 

Latin  influence  began  at  once  when  the  Angles  and  Saxons  came 
into  contact  with  the  partly  Romanized  Britons,  and  it  was  greatly 
strengthened  by  the  introduction  of  Christianity.  A  few  Celtic 
words  (such  as  crag,  cart,  cradle)  were  taken  up,  and  a  slight  Norse 
element  {.e.g.,  keel,  stern,  tackle,  harbor,  thrall)  came  in  with  the  Danes. 
The  next  great  influence,  however,  was  the  Romance,  or  French 
influence.  This  began  about  the  time  of  the  Norman  conquest, 
but  more  conspicuous  than  the  influence  of  the  Norman  French  was 
the  influence  of  Parisian  French,  both  because  of  its  literature  and 
because  the  French  of  the  English  court  became  after  the  loss  of  Nor- 
mandy, Parisian  French.  Large  numbers  of  Romance  words  were 
borrowed  between  1300  and  1500  and  many  of  them  still  remain. 
l*^xamples  are :  prison,  castle,  court,  realm,  royal,  frailty,  gentle,  course, 
voyage,  joy,  damsel,  deceive,  etc.  Then,  at  the  time  of  the  Re- 
naissance, about  the  beginning  of  the  Modern  English  period,  Latin 


THE  VOCABULARY  395 

influence  received  a  fresh  impetus,  and  Greek,  Italian,  and  Spanish 
influences  were  also  speedily  felt.  The  result  is  that  the  English 
vocabulary  of  the  present  day  is  extremely  composite. 

The  extent  to  which  the  Teutonic  framework  has  been  overlaid 
with  words  and  forms  of  Latin  and  Romance  origin  may  be  seen  by 
italicising  the  foreign  elements  in  any  sentence;  for  example:  "Latin 
influence  became  conspicuous  from  the  time  of  the  conversion  of  the 
English  to  Christianily  at  the  end  of  the  sixth  century."  In  fact, 
about  three-fourths  of  the  vocabulary  of  the  Anglo-Saxons  has 
entirely  disappeared,  along  with  much  of  the  grammatical  structure, 
yet  that  part  which  has  remained  is  so  important  and  fundamental 
that  a  count  of  all  the  words  (not  merely  the  different  words)  which 
we  use  in  any  given  speech,  will  show  the  words  of  native  origin  to 
be  largely  in  excess.  In  writers  like  Gibbon  and  Johnson  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  when  a  Latinized  diction  was  especially  favored, 
the  percentage  of  the  native  element  is  never  below  70,  while  in 
Tennyson  it  is  88,  in  Shakespeare  90,  and  in  the  Bible  94.  It  will 
be  interesting  in  this  connection  to  compare  several  versions  of  the 
New  Testament  made  at  different  periods.  See  also  the  footnote 
on  page  81. 


396 


APPENDIX 


4.     PARALLEL  TRANSLATIONS  FROM  THE  NEW 

TESTAMENT 

Matthew  25  :  24-30 


VULGATE.      ABOUT   A.  D. 

383 

Accedens  autem  et 
iinum  talentum  sumens, 
ait:  Domine,  scio  te 
quia  durus  es  homo, 
met  ens  ubi  non  semi- 
nasti,  et  congregans  ubi 
non  sparsisti :  et  timore 
perculsus,  abiens  ab- 
scondi  talentum  tuum 
in  terra:  ecce  habes 
tuum.  Respondens 
autem  dominus  ejus, 
dixit  ei:  Male  serve  et 
piger,  sciebas  quia  meto 
ubi  non  seminavi,  et 
congrego  ubi  non  sparsi. 
Oportuit  ergo  te  jacere 
argentum  meum  men- 
sariis:  et  veniens  ego 
recepissem  utique 
meum  cum  usura.  Tol- 
lite  itaque  ab  eo  talen- 
tum, et  date  habenti 
decem  talenta.  Nam 
habenti  omni  dabitur, 
et  augebitur:  a  vero 
non  habente,  et  quod 
videtur  habere,  aufer- 
etur  ab  eo.  Et  inuti- 
lem  servum  ejicite  in 
tenebras  exteriores :  illic 
erit  Actus  et  fremitus 
deutium. 


ANGLO-SAXON  VERSION. 

CORPUS   MS. 

BEFORE    A.  D.     1000 

Tha  com  se  the  thjBt 
an  pund  underfeng  and 
■  cwseth,  Hlaford,  ic  wat 
thaet  thu  eart  heard 
mann:  thu  ripst  thser 
thu  ne  seowe,  and  gad- 
erast  thaer  thu  ne 
sprengdest :  and  ic  f erde 
ofdrsEd,  and  behydde 
thin  pund  on  eorthan: 
her  thu  haefst  thaet  thin 
ys.  Tha  andswarode  hys 
hlaford  him  and  cw£Bth, 
Thu  yfela  theow  and 
slawa:  thu  wistest  th£et 
ic  rype  thaer  ic  ne  sawe, 
and  ic  gaderige  thaer  ic 
ne  stredde:  hyt  geby- 
rede  thaet  thu  befsestest 
min  feoh  mynyterum, 
and  ic  name  thaenne  ic 
come  thaet  min  ys  mid 
tham  gafole.  Anymath 
thaet  pund  aet  hym, 
and  syllath  tham  the 
me  tha  tyn  pund 
brohte.  Witodliceaelcon 
thaera  the  haefth  man 
sylth  and  he  haefth 
genoh:  tham  the  naefth 
thaet  hym  thincth  thaet 
he  haebbe,  thaet  hym 
byth  aetbrodyn.  And 
wurpath  thone  unnyt- 
tan  theowan  on  tha 
uttran  thystru,  thaer 
byth  wop  and  totha 
gristbitung. 

[Note. — In  the  foregoing 
transliteration  the  char- 
acter thorn  of  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  original  has  been 
replaced  by  its  modern 
equivalent,  th,  to  facilitate 
comparison.] 


WYCLIF  S  TRANSLATION, 

1380 

But  he  that  hadde 
take  o  besaunt,  cam 
and  seide.  Lord,  I  woot 
that  thou  art  an  hard 
man :  thou  repist  where 
thou  hast  not  sowe, 
and  thou  gaderist  to- 
gidre  where  thou  hast 
not  sprad  abrood:  and 
I  dredynge  wente  and 
hidde  thi  besaunt  in  the 
erthe:  lo,  thou  hast 
that  that  is  thin.  His 
lord  answeride,  and 
seide  to  hym,  Yvel  ser- 
vaunt  and  slouth : 
wistist  thou  that  I  repe 
where  I  seew  not,  and 
gadere  togidre  where  I 
spradde  not  abrood ; 
therfore  it  bihoved 
thee  to  bitake  my  monei 
to  chaungers,  that 
whanne  I  cam  I  schulde 
rescejrve  that  that  is 
myn  with  usuris.  Ther- 
for  take  awey  fro  hym 
the  besaunt,  and  yeve 
to  hym  that  hath  ten 
besauntis.  For  to  every 
man  that  hath,  me 
schal  yeve,  and  he  schal 
encrese:  but  fro  hym 
that  hath  not,  also  that 
that  he  semeth  to  have 
schal  be  takun  awey 
fro  hym.  And  caste  ye 
out  the  unprofitable  ser- 
vaunt  in  to  uttirmore 
derknessis,  there  schal 
be  wepynge  and  grynt- 
ynge  of  teeth. 


PARALLEL  TRANSLATIONS  FROM  THE  BIBLE 


397 


TYNDALE  .S    TRANSLA- 
TION,   1534 

Then  he  which  had 
rcceaved  the  one  tal- 
ent, came  and  sayd, 
Master,  I  considered 
that  thou  wast  an  harde 
man,  which  repest  where 
tliou  sowedst  not,  and 
gadderest  where  thou 
strawedst  not,  and  was 
therfore  afrayde,  and 
went  and  hyd  thy  tal- 
ent in  the  erth:  behold, 
thou  hast  thyn  awne. 
His  master  answered 
and  sayde  unto  him, 
Thou  evyll  servaunt 
and  slewthf uU,  thou 
knewest  that  I  repe 
where  I  sowed  not,  and 
gaddre  where  I  strawed 
not :  thou  oughtest  ther- 
fore to  have  had  my 
money  to  the  chaung- 
ers,  and  then  at  my 
comynge  shulde  I  have 
receaved  m  y  n  awne 
with  vauntago.  Take 
therfore  the  talent  from 
him,  and  geve  it  unto 
him  which  hath  .v.  tal- 
entes.  For  unto  every 
man  that  hath  shalbe 
geven,  and  he  shall  have 
aboundance:  and  from 
him  that  hath  not,  shal- 
be taken  awaye  even 
that  he  hath .  And  cast 
that  unprofitable  ser- 
vaunt into  utter  derck- 
nes:  there  shalbe  wep- 
ynge  and  gnasshinge  of 
teeth. 


authorised 
(king  james)  version,    revised  version,  1881. 
1611. 


24.  Then  he  which 
had  received  the  one 
talent,  came  and  said. 
Lord,  I  knew  thee  that 
thou  art  an  hard  man, 
reaping  where  thou  hast 
not  sowen,  and  gather- 
ing where  thou  hast  not 
strawed : 

2.5.  And  I  was 
afraid,  and  went  and 
hidde  thy  talent  in  the 
earth:  loe,  there  thou 
hast  that  is  thine. 

26.  His  lord  an- 
swered, and  said  unto 
him,  Thou  wicked  and 
slouthfull  servant,  thou 
knewest  that  I  reape 
where  I  sowed  not,  and 
gather  where  I  have  not 
strawed : 

27.  Thou  oughtest 
therefore  to  have  put 
my  money  to  the  ex- 
changers, and  then  at 
my  comming  I  should 
have  received  mine 
owne  with  usury. 

28.  Take  therefore 
the  talent  from  him, 
and  give  it  unto  him 
which  hath  ten  talents. 

29.  For  unto  every 
one  that  hath  shall  be 
given,  and  he  shall  have 
abundance :  but  from 
him  that  hath  not,  shall 
be  taken  away,  even 
that  which  he  hath. 

30.  And  cast  yee  the 
unprofitable  servant 
into  outer  darkness, 
there  shaU  be  weeping 
and  gnashing  of  teeth. 

The  verse  nurabering  was  introduced  in  the  year  1551. 


And  he  also  that  had 
received  the  one  talent 
came  and  said.  Lord,  I 
knew  thee  that  thou  art 
a  hard  man,  reaping 
where  thou  didst  not 
sow,  and  gathering 
where  thou  didst  not 
scatter;  lo,  thou  luust 
thine  own.  But  liis 
lord  answered  and  said 
unto  him.  Thou  wicked 
and  slothful  servant, 
thou  knewest  that  I 
reap  where  I  sowed  not, 
and  gather  where  I  did 
not  scatter;  thou  ought- 
est therefore  to  have 
put  my  money  tf)  the 
bankers,  and  at  my 
coming  I  should  have 
received  back  mine  own 
with  interest.  Take  yo 
away  therefore  the  tal- 
ent from  him,  and  give 
it  unto  him  that  hath 
the  ten  talents.  For 
unto  every  one  that 
hath  shall  be  given,  and 
he  shall  have  abun- 
dance: but  from  him 
that  hath  not,  even  that 
which  he  hath  .shall  be 
taken  away.  And  cast 
ye  out  the  unprofitable 
servant  into  the  outer 
darkness :  there  shall  be 
the  weeping  and  gnash- 
ing of  teeth. 


39$ 


APPENDIX 


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40()  APPENDIX 

2.     LIST  OF  MINOR  AUTHORS  AND  THEIR  CHIEF  WORKS. 
The  Elizabethan  Age. 

POETS. 

(See  text  for  Sackville,  Spenser,  Sidney.) 

(before  1600.) 

George  Gascoigne,  15257-1577.     The  Steel  Glass,  1576, 

Thomas  Watson,  1557?-1592.  Hecatompathia,  or  Passionate  Cen- 
tury of  Love,  1582. 

Samuel  Daniel,  1562-1619.     Sonnets  to  Delia,  1592. 

George  Chapman,  15597-1634.  Completion  of  Marlowe's  Hero  and 
Leander,  1598;  Translation  of  the  Iliad  and  the  Odyssey, 
1598-1615. 

Michael  Drayton,  1563-1631.  Idea's  Mirror  (sonnets),  1594;  Ballad 
of  Agincourt,  c.  1605;  Polyolbion,  1613-1622;  Nymphidiu, 
1627. 

(after  1600.) 

Thomas  Campion,  d.  1619.     Book  of  Airs,  1601,  etc. 

Giles  Fletcher,  15887-1623.     Christ's  Victory  and  Triumph,  1610. 

William  Browne,  1.591-1643?     Britannia's  Pastorals,  1613-1616. 

George  Wither,  1588-1667.     Satires,  Hymns,  etc.,  1613  onward. 

Phineas  Fletcher,  1582-1650.     The  Purple  Island,  1633. 

John  Donne,  1573-1631.    Divine  Poems,  Sonnets,  etc.,  collected  1633. 

DRAMATISTS.  ■ 

(See  text  for  Marlowe,  Shakespeare,  Jonson,  Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  Webster.) 
(before  1600.) 

John  Lyly,  15547-1606.     Alexander  and  Campaspe,  1584,  and  other 

court  comedies,  mostly  in  prose. 
George  Peele,  15587-1597?     The  Arraignment  of    Paris,  1584,    and 

other  masques  and  plays. 
Robert  Greene,  15607-1592.     Friar  Bacon  and  Friar  Bungay,  acted 

1594,  and  other  romantic  plays,  novels,  etc. 

(after  1600.) 

George  Chapman,  15597-1634.  All  Fools,  acted  1599,  and  other 
comedies;  Bussy  d'Ambois,  1607,  and  other  tragedies. 

Thomas  Middleton,  15707-1627.  The  Roaring  Girl  (with  Dekker), 
1611;  The  Changeling  (with  Rowley),  acted  1621;  Women, 
Beware  Women,  etc. 


MINOR   AUTHORS   AND   THEIR   CHIEF    WORKS  401 

Thomas  Dekker,  15707-1641?     Fortunatus,  1600,  etc. 

John  Marston,  1575?-1634.     What  You  Will,  1607,  etc. 

Thomas  Heywood,  c.  1575-1650.     A  Woman  Killed  with  Kindness, 

1603,  etc. 
Cyril  Tourneur,  15757-1626.   The  Revenger's  Tragedy,  1607,  etc. 
Philip  Massinger,  1583-1640.     A  New  Way  to  Pay  Old  Debts,  1632, 

etc. 
John  Ford,  fl.  1639.     The  Broken  Heart,  1633,  etc. 
James  Shirley,  1596-1666.     The  Traitor,  1631,  etc. 

PROSE  WRITERS. 

(See  text  for  Lyly,  Sidney,  Hooker.  Bacon,  Burton.) 

Richard  Hakluyt,  15527-1616.  Navigations,  Voyages,  and  Discov- 
eries, 1589. 

Sir  Walter  Raleigh,  15527-1618.  The  Discovery  of  Guiana,  1596; 
History  of  the  World,  1614. 

Thomas  Lodge,  15587-1625.  Rosalind,  1590,  a  romance;  also  a 
play,  poems,  and  miscellaneous  work. 

Thomas  Nash,  1567-1601.  Pierce  Penniless,  1592,  a  satire;  The 
Unfortunate  Traveller,  1594,  a  novel  of  adventure;  etc. 

Also  Spenser,  Greene,  Dekker,  etc. 

Caroline  and  Puritan  Period.     Age  of  Milton. 
Middle  of  the  Seventeenth  Century. 

POETS. 

(See  text  tor  Crashaw,  Herrick,  Cowley,  Milton.) 

George  Herbert,  1593-1633.     The  Temple,  c.  1631  (printed  1652.) 

Francis  Quarles,  1592-1644.     Emblems,  Divine  and  Moral,  1635. 

Henry  Vaughan,  1622-1695.     Poems,  1646. 

Thomas  Carew,  15987-16397     Poems,  1640. 

Sir  John  Suckling,  1609-1642.     Fragmenta  Aurea,  1646. 

Richard  Lovelace,  1618-1658.     Lucasta,  1649. 

Sir  William  Davenant,  1606-1668.  Gondibert,  1651;  also  plays, 
masques,  and  operas. 

Andrew  Marvell,  1621-1678.  Horatian  Ode  upon  Cromwell's  Re- 
turn from  Ireland,  written  1650. 

Edmund  Waller,  1606-1687.  Poems  (many  in  the  "new"  couplet), 
1645. 

Sir  John  Denham,  1615-1669.     Cooper's  Hill  (in  couplets),  1642. 


402  APPENDIX 

PROSE  WRITERS. 

(See  text  for  Taylor,  Browne,  Walton,  Milton.) 

Thomas  Hobbes,  1588-1679.     Leviathan,  1651. 

James  Howell,  1594?-1666.     Epistolse  Ho-ElianjE,  1645-1655. 

Thomas    Fuller,    1608-1661.     Church    History,    1655;   Worthies   of 

England,  1662. 
Edward  Hyde,  Earl  of  Clarendon,  1609-1674.  History  of  the  Great 

Rebellion,  published  1702-1704. 

The  Restoration  Period.     Age  op  Dryden. 
1660-1700. 
(See  text  for  Butler,  Pepys,  Bunyan,  Dryden.) 
dramatists  (mostly  comic). 

Thomas  Otway,  1652-1685.     Don  Carlos  (in  couplets),  1676;  Venice 

Preserved  (a  blank  verse  tragedy),  1682;  etc. 
Sir  George  Etherege,  1635 ?-l  691.     She  Would  if  She  Could,  1667; 

The  Man  of  Mode,  1676;  etc. 
William   Wycherley,    1640?-1716.     The   Country   Wife,    1675;   The 

Plain  Dealer,  1677;  etc. 
William  Congreve,  1670-1729.     Love  for  Love,  1695;  The  Mourning 

Bride  (a  tragedy),  1697;  The  Way  of  the  World,  1700;  etc. 
Sir  John  Vanbrugh   1664-1726.     The  Relapse,  1696;  etc. 
George  Farquhar,  1678-1707.     The  Constant  Couple,  1700;  etc. 
prose  writers. 

John  Evelyn,  1620-1706.     Diary  [1641-1697],  published  1818. 

Sir  William  Temple,  1628-1699.     Essays,  1680,  1692. 

Sir  Isaac  Newton,  1642-1727.     Principia  (Latin).  1687. 

John  Locke,  1632-1704.     Essay  concerning  Human  Understanding, 

1690;  etc. 
Jeremy  Collier,  1650-1726.     Short  View  of  the  Immorality  and  Pro- 

faneness  of  the  English  Stage,  1698. 
Richard  Bentley,  1662-1742.     Dissertation  on  the  Letters  of  Phala- 

ris,  1699. 

Age  of  Swift  and  Pope. 

1700-1740. 

poets. 

(See  text  for  Swift,  Young,  and  Pope.) 

Matthew  Prior,  1664-1721.     Poems  (occasional  pieces,  epigrams,  etc.) 

1709. 


MINOR  AUTHORS   AND  THEIR  CHIEB^   WORKS  403 

Thomas  Paraell,  1679-1718.  Poems  (The  Hermit,  in  heroics,  1710; 
Hymn  to  Contentment,  in  octosyllabics,  etc.),  collected  1721. 

John  Gay,  1685-1732.  Shepherd's  Week  (satirical  eclogues),  1714; 
Trivia,  1716;  Fables,  1727;  Beggar's  Opera,  1728. 

Isaac  Watts,  1674-1748.     Hymns,  1707;  Divine  Songs,  1715. 

Allan  Ramsay  (Scottish),  1686-1758.  The  Gentle  Shepherd  (a  pas- 
toral drama),  1725.     Also  songs  in  dialect. 

PROSE    WRITERS. 
(See  text  for  Swift,  Steele,  and  Addisou— Defoe  in  a  succeeding  chapter.) 

Earl  of  Shaftesbury  (Anthony  Ashley  Cooper),  1671-1713.  Charac- 
teristics of  Men,  Manners,  etc.,  1711. 

John  Arbuthnot,  1667-1735.  History  of  John  Bull,  a  satirical  alle- 
gory, 1712. 

Viscount  BoUngbroke  (Henry  St.  John),  1678-1751.  Reflections 
upon  Exile  (written  1716),  1735;  Letters  to  Sir  Wm.  Wind- 
ham (written  1717),  1753;  etc. 

George  Berkeley  (Bishop),  1685-1753.  Treatise  Concerning  Human 
Knowledge,  1710;  Alciphron,  1732. 

Joseph  Butler  (Bishop),  1692-1752.  Sermons,  1726;  Analogy  of 
Religion,  1736. 

Age  of  Johnsox  and  Burke. 

1740-1798. 

(See  text  for  the  novelists,  Richardson,  Fielding,  Smollett,  and  Sterne,  aiMi  for 
Johnson,  Goldsmith,  Sheridan,  Gibbon,  Burke,  Thomson,  Collins,  Gray, 
"Ossian,"  Chatterton,  Cowper,  Crabbe,  Blake,  and  Burns.) 

poets. 

William  Shenstone,  1714-1763.     The  Schoolmistress,  1737. 

John   Wesley,    1703-1791.     Psalms  and   Hymns   (with  his  brother 

Charles),  1738. 
Robert  Blair,  1699-1746.     The  Grave,  1743. 

Mark  Akenside,  1721-1770.     Pleasures  of  the  Imagination,  1744. 
Charles  Churchill,  1731-1764.     The  Rosciad,  1761;  The  Ghost,  1762; 

and  other  satires. 
James  Beattie,  1735-1803.     The  Minstrel,  1771-1774. 

PROSE    WRITERS. 

David  Hume,  1711-1776.     Essays  Moral  and  Pohtical,  1741-1742; 

History  of  England,  1754-1762. 
William  Robertson,  1721-1793.     History  of  Scotland,  1759. 
Thomas  Warton,  1728-1790.     History  of  English  Poetry,  1774-1781. 
Lady  Mary  Wortley  Montagu,  1689-1762.     Letters,  1763. 


404  APPENDIX 

"Junius"  (Sir  Pliilip  Francis?  1740-1818).     Letters,  1768-1773, 
Lord  Chesterfield   (Philip   Dormer  Stanhope),   1694-1773.     Letters 

to  his  Son,  1774. 
Adam  Smith,  1723-1790.     Wealth  of  Nations,  1776. 
WiUiam  Paley,  1743-1805.     Moral  and  Political  Philosophy,  1785. 
Gilbert  White,  1720-1793.     Natural  History  of  Selborne,  1789. 
James  Boswell,  1740-1795.     Life  of  Doctor  Johnson,  1791. 

WRITERS    OF   FICTION. 

Horace  Walpole,  1717-1797.     The  Castle  of  Otranto,  1764;  Letters. 

Henry  Mackenzie,  1745-1831.     The  Man  of  Feehng,  1771,  etc. 

Frances  Burney  (Madame  d'Arblay),  1752-1840.  Evelina,  1778; 
Cecilia,  1782;  Camilla,  1796;  The  Wanderer,  1814;  Diary  and 
Letters,  1842-1846. 

William  Beckford,  1759-1844.     Vathek,  1784. 

Ann  Radcliffe,  1764-1823.  A  Sicilian  Romance,  1790;  The  Mysteries 
of  Udolpho,  1794;  The  Italian,  1797. 

William  Godwin,  1756-1836.  Political  Justice,  1793;  The  Adven- 
tures of  Caleb  Williams,  1794. 

Age  of  Wordsworth  and  Scott. 

1798-1840. 


(See  text  for  Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  Scott,  Southey,  Byron,  Shelley,  Keats, 
Landor,  Moore,  and  Campbell.) 

Samuel  Rogers,  1763-1855.     Pleasures  of  Memory,  1792;  Italy,  1822. 

Leigh  Hunt,  1784-1859.     The  Story  of  Rimini,  1816. 

Bryan  Waller  Procter  ("Barry  Cornwall"),  1787-1874.     Songs,  1832. 

John  Keble,  1792-1866.     The  Christian  Year,  1827. 

George  Darley,  1795-1846.     Sylvia,  1827;  Nepenthe,  1839. 

Thomas  Hood,  1799-1845.  Odes  and  Addresses,  1825.  Song  of  the 
Shirt,  1843. 

Winthrop  Mackworth  Praed,  1802-1839.  "Society  verse,"  etc.,  col- 
lected 1844. 

Thomas  Lovell  Beddoes,  1803-1849.  The  Bride's  Tragedy,  written 
1819;  Death's  Jest  Book,  begun  1825,  published  1850. 

novelists. 

(See  text  for  Scott  and  Jane  Austen.) 

Maria  Edge  worth,  1767-1849.  Castle  Rackrent,  1800;  Moral  Tales, 
1801 ;  etc. 


MINOR   AUTHORS   AND   THEIR   CHIEF    WORKS  405 

Jane  Porter,  1776-1850.  Thaddcus  of  Warsaw,  1803;  Scottish 
Chiefs,  1810. 

Thomas  Love  Peacock,  1785-1866.  Headlong  Hall,  1816;  The  Mis- 
fortunes of  Elphin,  1829;  etc. 

Frederick  Marryat,  1792-1848.  The  Xaval  Officer,  1829;  Mr.  Mid- 
shipman Easy,  1836;  etc. 

ESSAYISTS,    HISTORI.VNS,    ETC. 

(See  text  for  Coleridge,  Southey,  Lamb,  De  Quincey,  Landor,  and  Macaulay.) 

Francis  Jeffrey,  1773-1850.     Contributions  to  the  Edinburgh  Review. 
Sydney  Smith,  1771-1845.     Letters  of  Peter  Plymley,  1807. 
William  Hazlitt,  1778-1830.     The  Characters  of  Shakespeare's  Plays, 

1817;  Lectures  on  English  Poets,   1818;  Spirit  of  the  Age, 

1825;  etc. 
Leigh  Hunt,  1784-1859.     London  Journal,   1834-35;    Imagination 

and  Fancy,  1844;  etc. 
John  Wilson   ("Christopher  North"),   1785^1854.     Xoctes  Ambro- 

sianae,  contributed  to  Blackwood's,  1822-35. 
John  Gibson  Lockhart,   1794-1854.     Life  of  Burns,   1828;  Life  of 

Scott,  1838. 
Henry  Hallam,  1777-1859.     Europe  during  the  Middle  .\ges,  1818; 

Constitutional  Hi.story  of  England,  1    27;  Introduction  to  the 

Literature  of  Europe,  1837-39. 
Henry  Hart  Milman,  1791-1868.     History  of  Christianity,  1840,  1855; 

etc. 

The  Victorian  Age. 
1830-1880. 


(See  text  for  Tennyson,  Browning,  Mrs.  Browning,  Fitzgerald.  Arnold, 
and  Clough.) 

William  Barnes,  1801-1886.     Poems  in  Dorset  Dialect,  1844. 
Robert   Stephen    Hawker,    1803-1875.     CornLsh    Ballads   and   other 

Poems,  1869. 
Richard  Hengist  Home,  1803-1884.     Death  of  Marlowe  (tnigedy), 

1837;  Orion  (epic),  1843;  etc. 
Philip  James  Bailey,  1816-1902.     Festus  (drama),  1839. 
Sydney  Dobell,  1824-1874.     The  Roman,  1850;  Balder,  1853  (closet 

dramas). 
Frederick  Locker-Lampson,  1821-1895.     London  Lyrics,  1857. 
Coventry  Patraore,  1823-1890.     The  Angel  in  the  House,  1854-1862. 


406  APPENDIX 

NOVELISTS. 

(See  text  for  Disraeli,  liulwer-Lytton,  Dickens,  Thackeray,  Keade,  TroUope, 
Kingsley,  Charlotte  Bronte,  and  George  Eliot.) 

Samuel  Lover,  1797-1868.     Rory  O'More,  1837;  Handy  Andy,  1842. 
Charles  James  Lever,  1806-1872.     Harry  Lorrequer,  1839;  Charles 

O'Malley,  1840;  etc. 
Elizabeth  Cleghorn  Gaskell,  1810-1865.     Mary  Barton,  1848;  Cran- 

ford,  1853;  etc. 
Emily  Jane  Bronte,  1818-1848.     Wuthcring  Heights,  1848. 
.\nne  Bronte,  1820-1849.     Tenant  of  Wildfell  Hall,  and  .^gnes  Grey, 

1848. 
Dinah  Maria  Mulock  (Mrs.  Craik),  1826-1887.     John  Halifax,  Gen- 
tleman, 1857. 
William  Wilkie  Collins,   1824-1889.     The  Dead  Secret,   1857;  The 

Woman  in  White,  1860;  The  Moonstone,  1868;  etc. 
Henry  Kingsley,  1830-1876.     GeoflFrey  Hamlyn,   1859;  Ravenshoe, 

1861;  etc. 
Richard  Doddridge  Blackmore,  1825-1900.     Clara  Vaughan,  1864; 

Cradock  Nowell,  1866;  Lorna  Doone,  1869;  etc. 

PHILOSOPHERS,  HISTORIANS,  ESSAYISTS,  ETC. 
(See  text  for  Carlyle,  Ruskin,  Arnold,  Newman,  Froude,  Spencer,  and  Huxley.) 
John    Stuart    Mill,    1806-1873.     System    of    Logic,    1843;    Political 

Economy,  1848;  On  Liberty,  1859;  etc. 
Charles  Robert  Darwin,   1809-1882.     Origin  of  Species,  1859;  The 

Descent  of  Man,  1871 ;  etc. 
George  Borrow,  1803-1881.     The  Gypsies  in  Spain,  1841;  The  Bible 

in  Spain,  1843;  Lavengro,  1851;  The  Romany  Rye,  1857. 
Alexander  William  Kinglake,   1809-1891.     Eothen,   1844;  Inva.sion 

of  the  Crimea,  1863-87. 
Henry  Thomas  Buckle,  1 821-1862.     Hi.story  of  Civilization  in  Europe, 

1857-61. 
Edward  Augustus   Freeman,   1823-1892.     History  of  the  Norman 

Conquest,  1867-79;  English  Con.stitution,  1872. 
John  Richard  Green,  1837-1883.     Short  History  of  the  English  Peo- 
ple, 1874. 

Later  Victorians. 
1860-1900. 
(See  text  for  Rossetti,  Morris.  Swinburne,  Pater,  and  Stevenson.) 

Christina  Georgina  Ros.setti,  1830-1894.     Goblin  Market,  1862;  etc. 
James  Thomson,  1834-1882.     The  City  of  Dreadful  Night,  1874 ;  etc. 


MINOR  AUTHORS   AND  THEIR  CHIEF  WORKS  407 

Arthur  William   Edgar   O'Shaughnessy,    1844-1881.     The   Epic  of 

Women,  1870;  Music  and  Moonlight,  1874. 
Sir  Edwin  Arnold,   1831-1904.     Light  of  Asia,  1878;  Light  of  the 

World,  1890. 
William  Ernest  Henley,  1849-1903.     A  Book  of  Verses,  1888;  The 

Song  of  the  Sword,  1892;  Plays  (with  Stevenson);  etc. 
John   Addington    Symonds,    1840-1893.     (Historian,    essayist,    and 

poet.)     The  Italian  Renaissance,  1875-86;  Many  Moods,  1878. 
Richard  Jefferies,  1848-1887.     (Writer  of  prose).     The  Gamekeeper 

at  Home,  1877;  Story  of  My  Heart,  1883. 

3.     CHRONOLOGY  OF  THE  WORKS  OF  CHAUCER  AND 
SHAKESPEARE. 

Chaucer,  1340?-1400. 
(The  dates  are  mostly  conjectural.) 

*The  Romaunt  of  the  Rose.  1385-86.    The    Legend  of   Good 

*An  A.  B.  C.  Women. 

1369.  The  Book  of  the  Duchesse.  1386-93.  The  Canterbury  Tales. 

?     Anelida  and  Arcite.  1391.  A  Treatise  on  the  Astro- 
1377-81.  Translation  of  Boethius.  labe. 

1379?  The  Compleynt  of  Mars.  1393?  The  Compleynt  of  Venus. 

1379-83.  Troilus  and  Criseyde.  1399.  Envoy  to  Compleint  to  his 
1382.  The  Parlement  of  Foules.  Purse. 

1383-84.  The  Hous  of  Fame. 

Shakespeare,  1564-1616. 

(The  dates  of  writing— given  first— are  largely  conjectural.) 

First  Period. 

1591.  Love's  Labour's  Lost,  pub-      1592.  Henry  VL,  1594-1623. 
lished  1598.  1593.  Richard  III.,  1597. 

1591.  Two  Gentlemen  of  Verona,      1593.  Richard  II.,  1597: 

1623.  1593.  Titus  Andronicus,  1600. 

1592.  Comedy  of  Errors,  1623.  1593.  Venus  and  Adonis,  1593. 
1592.  Romeo  and  Juliet,  1597.          1594.  Lucrece,  1594. 

Second  Period. 

1594.  The    Merchant   of    Venice,     1595.  Midsummer  Night's  Dream, 

1600.  1600. 

1594.  King  John,  1623. 

•  Poems  often  attributed  to  Chaucer. 


408  APPENDIX 

1595.  AU's  Well  that  Ends  Well,     1598.  Hemy  V.,  16()0. 

1623.  1599.  Much  Ado  about  Nothing, 

1596.  The  Taming  of  the  Shrew,  1600 

1623.  1599.  As  You  Like  It,  1623. 

1597.  Henry  IV.,  1598-1600.  1600.  Twelfth  Night,  1623. 

1598.  Merry   Wives   of   Windsor, 

1602. 

Third  Period. 

1601.  Julius  Caesar,  1623.  1606.  King  Lear,  1608. 

1602.  Hamlet,  1603.  1608.  Timon  of  Athens,  1608. 

1603.  Troilus  and  Cressida,  1609.  1608.  Pericles,  1609. 

1604.  Othello,  1622  1608.  Antony  and  Cleopatra,  1623. 
1604.  Measure  for  Measure,  1623.  1608.  Coriolanus,  1623. 

1606.  Macbeth,  1623.  ?     Sonnets,  1609. 

Fourth  Period. 

1610.  Cymbeline,  1623.  1612.  Henry  VIII.  (completed  by 

1611.  Winter's  Tale,  1623.  others),  1623. 
1611.  The  Tempest,  1623. 

4.     CLASSIFIED  DETAILS  OF  BIOGRAPHICAL  AND  LITER- 
ARY INTEREST. 

Important  writers  who  were  born,  and  who,  unless  specific  statement 
to  the  contrary  is  made,  lived  in  London:  Chaucer,  More, 
Spenser,  Bacon,  Donne,  Herrick  (1.  in  Devonshire),  Milton, 
Cowley,  Defoe,  Pope,  Gray  (1.  Cambridge),  Blake,  Lamb, 
Byron  (1.  Newstead  and  on  the  continent),  Lytton,  Keats, 
Browning,  Ruskin,  Rossetti,  Swinburne. 

Ol/iier  writers  closely  associated  with  London:  Sidney,  Marlowe, 
Shakespeare,  Jonson,  Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  Walton,  Dry- 
den,  Pepys,  Swift,  Steele,  Addison,  Richardson,  Fielding,  John- 
son, Goldsmith,  Burke,  Carlylo,  Macaulay,  Thackeray,  Dickens, 
Morris. 

Of  Scotch  birth  or  parentage:  Dunbar,  Drummond,  Ramsay,  Blair, 
Thomson,  Hume,  Robertson,  Smollett,  Beattie,  Macpherson, 
Mackenzie,  Boswell,  Campbell,  Burns,  Hogg,  Scott,  Lockhart, 
Wilson,  Jeffrey,  Carlyle,  "Ruskin  (b.  in  London),  Stevenson. 
(Macaulay  was  Scotch  on  the  father's  side.) 

Of  Irish  birth  or  parentage:  Swift  (b.  Dublin),  Steele  (b.  Dublin), 
Farquhar,  Parnell,  Berkeley,  Goldsmith,  Burke  (b.  Dublin), 
Sheridan,  Hazlitt  (b.  in  England),  Moore,  Lever,  Fitzgerald 
(b.  in  England),  the  Brontes  (b.  in  England). 


DETAILS   OF  LITERARY   INTEREST  409 

Of  Italian  extraction:  Rossetti.  Of  Dutch  extraction:  Pater. 
Of  Jewish:  Disraeli. 

Sovereigns  who  were  men  of  letters:  Alfred,  James  I.  of  Scotland 
(also  James  I.  of  England). 

Peers  of  the  Realm: 

Earls:     Surrey,   Sackville,   Clarendon,  Chesterfield,   Walpole, 

Disraeli,  Lytton  (the  younger,  Viceroy  of  India). 
Viscounts:     Bacon,   Bolingbroke. 

Barons:     Berners,    Byron,    Macaulay,    Lytton    (the    elder| 
Tennyson. 

Baronets:     Scott,  Aubrey  de  Vere. 

Knights:  Mandeville,  Malory,  More,  Wyatt,  Sidney,  Raleigh,  Over 
bury,  Thomas  Browne,  Suckling,  Temple,  Etherege,  Vair 
brugh,  Steele,  Leslie  Stephen. 

In  humble  occupations:  Bunyan  (tinker),  Allan  Ramsay  (wig 
maker).  Burns  (farmer  and  ale-gauger).  Lamb  (clerk). 

Of  humble  birth.  Latimer,  Shakespeare,  Samuel  Butler,  Beat  tie, 
and  Burns  were  sons  of  farmers,  Marlowe  the  son  of  a  shoe- 
maker, Webster  and  Pepys  the  sons  of  tailors,  Bunyan  the 
son  of  a  tinker.  Pope  the  son  of  a  linen  draper,  Collins  the  son 
of  a  hatter,  Keats  the  son  of  a  livery-stable  keeper,  C'arlyle 
the  son  of  "a  stone-mason.  Others  of  obscure  birth  were 
Jonson,  Defoe,  Crabbe,  Dickens. 

Tories:  Dryden,  Prior,  Parnell,  Swift,  Johnson,  John  Wilson, 
Scott,  etc. 

Whigs:  Defoe  (a  professed  Tory),  Addi.son,  Steele,  Chesterfield, 
"Junius,"  Burke,  Godwin,  Jeffrey,  Sydney  Smith,  Macau- 
lay,  etc 

Roman  Catholics  (since  the  time  of  the  reformation) :  Lodge,  Marlowe, 
Jonson  (for  a  time),  Doime  (in  early  life),  Crashaw  (in  latter 
life),  Dryden  (after  1686),  Wycherley,  Pope,  Moore,  Newman 
(after  1845),  Hawker  (in  late  life),  Patmore  (after  1864). 

Charterhouse  Pupils :    Crashaw,  Addison,  Steele,  Beddoes,  Thackeray. 

"Blue-coat  Boys"  (pupils  at  Christ's  Hospital,  London):  Coleridge, 
Lamb,  Hunt. 

Students  .\t  Cambridge: 

Ascham  (St.  John's).  Coleridge  (Jesus). 

Bacon  (Trinity).  Cowley  (Trin.). 

Bentley  (St.  J.).  Cra.'^haw. 

Byron  (Trin.).  Darwin  (Christ's). 

Chesterfield.  Dryden  (Trin.). 


410 


APPENDIX 


Fitzgerald  (Trin.). 
Fuller. 

Gascoigne  (Trin.). 
Gray   (Peterhouse,   Pem- 
broke). 
Herbert  (Trin.). 
Herrick  (St.  J.). 
Jonson  (St.  J.). 
Kinglake  (Trin.). 
Kingsley  (Magdalen). 
Latimer  (Christ's). 
Lyly  (Magd.). 
Lytton  (Trin.). 
Macaulay  (Trin.). 
Marlowe. 
Marvell  (Trin.). 
Milton  (Christ's). 


Paley  (Christ's). 
Popys  (Trin.). 
Praed  (Trin.). 
Prior  (St.  J.). 
Quarles. 
Skelton. 

Spenser  (Pembroke). 
.  Sterne  (Jesus). 
Suckling  (Trin.). 
Taylor. 
Temple. 

Tennyson  (Trin.). 
Thackeray  (Trin.). 
Walpole. 

Wordsworth  (St.  J.). 
White,  K.  (St.  J.). 
Wyatt  (St.  J.). 


Students  at  Oxford: 


Addison  (Queen's). 

Arnold  (Balliol). 

Beaumont  (Pembroke). 

Beddoes  (Pembroke). 

Blackmore. 

Browne. 

Burton  (Christ  Church). 

Butler,  Bp. 

Carew. 

Clarendon. 

Clough  (Balliol). 

Collins  (Magd.). 

De  Quincey. 

Donne. 

Evelyn  (Balliol). 

Freeman  (Trin.). 

Froude. 

Gibbon  (Magd.). 

Green,  J.  R. 

Hawker. 

Hobbes. 

Hooker. 

Johnson  (Pembroke). 


Keble. 

Landor  (Trin.). 
Locke  (Christ  C). 
Lockhart  (Balliol). 
Lodge  (Trin.). 
Lovelace. 
Lyly  (Magd.). 
Marlowe. 
Massinger. 
Milman. 
Morris. 

Newman  (Trin.). 
Otway  (Christ  C). 
Pater  (Queen's). 
Peele  (Christ  C). 
Percy  (Christ  C). 
Raleigh. 
Reade  (Magd.). 
Ruskin  (Christ  C). 
Selden  (Trin.). 
Shelley. 
Shenstone. 
Sidney  (Christ  C). 


DETAILS   OF   LITERARY   INTEREST  411 

Skelton.  Woslcys  (Christ  C). 

Smith,  Sydney.  Wartoti  (Trin.). 

Southey  (Balliol).  White,  G. 

Steele.  Wilson  (Magd.). 

Swinburne  (Balliol),  Wyclif. 

Symonds  (Balliol).  Wyeherley  (Queen's). 

Taylor.  Young. 
Tupper  (Christ  C). 

Students  at  Edinburgh  University:  Akenside,  Aytoun,  Boswell, 
Carlyle,  Darwin,  Drummond,  Jeffrey,  Scott,  Stevenson, 
Thomson.     At  Glasgow:     Campbell,  Smollett. 

Students  at  Dublin  University:  Berkeley,  Burke,  Congreve,  Far- 
quhar,  Goldsmith,  Lever,  Moore,  Parnell,  Swift. 

Poets  buried  in  Westminster  Abbey:  Chaucer,  Spenser,  Beaumont, 
Drayton,  Jonson,  Cowley,  Denham,  Davenant,  Dryden,  Rowe, 
Prior,  Gay,  Macpherson  ("Ossian"),  Campbell,  Browning, 
Tennyson.  There  are  also  monuments  to  many  who  are 
buried  elsewhere. 

Among  others  buried  in  the  Abbey  are:  Addison,  Doctor  Johnson, 
Macaulay,  and  Dickens. 

Bunyan  is  buried  in  Bunhill  Fields,  Goldsmith  in  the  Temple  Church, 
Milton  in  St.  Giles's,  Cripplegate,  Shakespeare  in  Stratford 
Church,  Wordsworth  at  Grasmere,  Keats  and  Shelley  in  the 
Protestant  Cemetery  at  Rome,  Thackeray  in  Kensal  Green, 
Mrs.  Browning  at  Florence,  Stevenson  on  Mt.  Vaea,  Samoa. 

Poets  Laitueate: 

1619-37.  Jonson.  1757-85.  William   White- 

1660-68.  Davenant.  head. 

1670-89.  Dryden.  1785-90.  Thomas  Warton. 

1689-92.  Thomas    Shad-  1790-1813.    Henry  James 

well.  Pye. 

1692-1715.    Nahum  Tate.  1813-43.  Southey. 

1715-18.  Nicholas  Rowe.  1843-50.  Wordsworth. 

1718-30.  Lawrence  Eus-  1850-92.  Tennyson. 

den.  1896-  .\lfred  Austin. 

1730-57.  CoUey  Cibbcr. 

Pen-names  .\nd  Literary  Disguises: 

Acton  Bell,  Anne  Bronti-.  .\stra;a,  Mrs.  Behn. 

Andrew  Morton,  Defoe.  Astropliel,  Sidney. 


412 


APPENDIX 


Barry  Cornwall,  I'iDcter. 

Boz,  Dickens. 

Christopher  (or  Kit)  North, 

John  Wilson. 
Colin  Clout,  Spenser. 
Currer    Bell,    Charlotte 

Bronte. 
Democritus,  Jr.,   Burton. 
Elia,  Lamb. 

Ellis  Bell,  Emily  Bronte. 
George  Eliot,  Mrs.  Cross. 


Sobriquets  : 


Isaac  Bickerstafr,  Swift, 
Steele. 

Junius,  Sir  Philip  Francis. 

Ossian,  James  Macpherson. 

Owen  Meredith,  Lytton  (the 
younger) . 

Samuel    Titmarsh,  Thack- 
eray. 

Spectator,  Addison,  Steele, 
etc. 

Thomas  Rowley,  Chatter- 
ton. 

Waverley,  Scott. 

Grammaticus,  ^Elfric. 

Philosopher  of  Highgate, 
Coleridge. 

Recluse  of  Olney,  Cowper. 

Sage  of  Chelsea,  Carlyle. 

Sweet  Singer  of  the  Temple, 
Herbert. 

Sweet  Swan  of  Avon,  Shake- 
speare. 

The  Venerable,  Bede. 

Wizard  of  the  North,  Scott. 

The  "Lake  School" — residents  in  the  Lake  district  of  Cumberland 
and  Westmoreland  —  were  Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  and 
Southey.  De  Quincey  and  John  Wilson  were  associated 
with  them  (as  was  also  Lamb),  and  are  sometimes  included. 

Tlie  "Cockney  School" — so  named  by  Lockhart — consisted  of  Hunt, 
Hazlitt,  Shelley,  and  Keats.  Other  "Cockneys" — so  named 
because  associated  with  these  or  with  the  London  Magazine — 
were  Byron,  Lamb,  De  Quincey,  Hood,  Procter,  Beddoes 
and  later  Dickens. 

The  "Spasmodic  School":  Philip  James  Baiky,  Alexander  Smitli, 
Gerald  Massey,  Sidney  Dobell,  etc. 

Poets  distinguished  also  as  writers  of  prose:  Chaucer,  Sidney,  Ben 
Jonson,  Milton,  Dryden,  Cowper  {Letters),  Coleridge,  Words- 
worth {Prefaces),  William  Morris,  Swinburne.  Among  other 
poets  who  wrote  prose  were  Spenser,  Gray,  Blake,  Shelley, 
Moore,   Fitzgerald,  Rossetti. 


.\yrshire  Plowman,  Burns. 
Bard  of  Avon,  Shakespeare. 
English  Opium   Eater,    De 

Quincey. 
Ettrick     Shepherd,     James 

Hogg. 
Father  of  Angling,  Walton. 
Father  of   English   Poetry 

Chaucer. 
Father    of    English    Prose, 

Ascham. 


DETAILS   OF   LITERARY   INTEREST 


413 


Prose  writers  distinguished  also  as  poets:  Addison,  Johnson,  Scott, 
Macaulay,  Kingsley.  Among  other  pros(!  writers  who  wnjte 
verse  were  Swift,  Hunt,  Newman,  Thackeray,  Lytton,  George 
Ehot,  Ruskin,  Symonds,  Stevenson. 

Writers  about  equally  distinguished  in  poetry  and  prose:  Donne, 
Cowley,  Goldsmith,  South ey,  Landor,  Arnold. 

Homes  of  Authors: 


Abbotsford,  Scott. 

Aldworth  (Surrey),  Tenny- 
son. 

Brantwood,  Ruskin. 

Down  Hall,  Prior. 

rarringford(Isle  of  Wight), 
Tennyson. 

Gadshill  Place,  Dickens. 

Greta  Hall,  Southey. 

Llanthony  Abbey,  Landor. 

Moor  Park,  Temple. 


New  Place,  Shakespeare. 
Newstead  Abbey,  Byron. 
Kelmscott,  Morris. 
Kilcolman,  Spenser. 
Penshurst,  Sidney. 
Rydal  Mount,  Wordswortli 
Shandy  Hall,  Sterne. 
Strawberry  Hill,  Walpole. 
•  The  Pines,  Swinburne. 
Vailima,  Stevenson. 
Villa  Gherardesca,  Landor. 


APPENDIX  C. 


1.     BIBLIOGRAPHY. 

Genekal  Works  of  Reference. 

History.     Gardiner's  Student's  History  of  England.     Green's  Short 
History  of  the  English  People.     Terry's  History  of  England 
for  Schools.    Traill's  Social  England. 
Language.     Marsh's  Lectures  on  the  English  Language.     Louns- 
bury's  English  Language.     O.  F.  Emerson's  History  of  the 
English  Language.     Greenough  and  Kittredge's  Words  and 
Their  Ways  in  English  Speech. 
Literary  History.     General:     Saintsbury's    A    Short    History    of 
English    Literature.     Gosse's    A    Short    History    of    Modern 
English  Literature.     Garnett  and  Gosse's  English  Literature: 
An  Illustrated    Record;   four  volumes.     Taine's    History  of 
English  Literature.     Ryland's  Chronological  Outlines  of  Eng- 
lish Literature  (tabulated  names  and  dates  only). 
Lite  iary  History.     Special    Periods    and    Departments : 

Brooke's  History  of  Early  English  Literature.     The  historj'^  of 

English  poetry  to  the  accession  of  King  Alfred,  871. 
Brooke's  English  Literature  from  the  Beginning  to  the  Norman 

Conquest. 
Ten  Brink's  History  of  English  Literature.     Two  volumes. 

To  the  death  of  Surrey. 
Morley's  English  Writers.     Eleven  volumes.     Down  to  and 

through  Shakespeare  and  his  time. 
Saintsbury's  History  of  Elizabethan  Literature.     1560-1660. 
Gosse's  History  of  Eighteenth  Century  Literature.    1660-1780. 
Saintsbury's    History    of    Nineteenth    Century    Literature. 

1780-1895. 
Courthope's  History  of  English  Poetry. 
Ward's  A  History  of  English  Dramatic  Literature.     Three 

volumes. 
Harford's  Age  of  Wordsworth. 
Walker's  Age  of  Tennyson. 

411 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


415 


Biography. 

Dictionary  of  National  Biograpliy. 

Encyclopaedia  Britannica. 

English  Men  of  Letters  Series.     Contains  biographies  of: 


Addison 

Cowper 

Hobbes 

Ruskin 

Arnold 

Crabbe 

Hume 

Scott 

Bacon 

Defoe 

Johnson 

Shelley 

^Bentley 

De  Quincey 

Keats 

Sheridan 

Browning 

Dickens 

Lamb 

Sidney 

Bunyan 

Dryden 

Landor 

Southey 

Burke 

Eliot  (George) 

Locke 

Spenser 

Burney 

Fielding 

Macaulay 

Sterne 

Bums 

Fitzgerald 

Milton 

Swift 

Byron 

Gibbon 

Moore 

Taylor 

Carlyle 

Goldsmith 

Pope 

Tennyson 

Chaucer 

Gray 

Richardson 

Thackeray 

Coleridge 

Hazlitt 

Rossetti 

Wordsworth 

Great  Writers  Series.     Contains  biographies  of: 

Austen  (Jane)           Coleridge 

Hunt(Leigh)  Scott 

Bronte  (Charlotte)  Congreve 

Johnson 

Shelley 

Browning 

Crabbe 

Keats 

Sheridan 

Bunyan 

Darwin 

Marryat 

Smith  (Adam 

Burns 

Dickens 

Mill 

Smollett 

Byron 

Eliot(Gec 

»rge)   Milton 

Thackeray 

Carlyle 

Goldsmith         Rossetti 

Collections  and  Selections. 

Chalmer's  British  Poets  from  Chaucer  to  Cowper.  Twenty-ont 
volumes. 

Ward's  The  English  Poets.  Selections,  with  critical  introductions. 
Four  volumes,  Chaucer  to  Tennyson. 

Craik's  English  Prose.     Similar  to  the  last.     Five  volumes. 

Arber's  British  Anthologies,  1401-1800.  Ten  volumes  with  glos- 
saries. 

Palgrave's  Golden  Treasury.  Songs  and  lyrical  poems  ouiy,  with 
notes. 

Stedman's  British  Anthology.  Selections  from  over  three  hundrea 
nineteenth  century  poets,  with  compact  biographical  notes. 

Page's  British  Poets  of  the  Nineteenth  Century.  Extended  selec- 
tions from  the  fifteen  foremost  poets. 


416  APPENDIX 

Single  Volume  Editions  of  the  Poets. 

Cambridge  Edition.  IltJUghton,  Mifflin  &  Co.  Edited,  with  intro- 
ductions, dates,  notes,  glossaries,  etc.  Contains  Ballads  (Eng- 
lish and  Scottish,  Child).  E.  B.  Browning,  Robert  Browning, 
Burns,  Keats,  Milton,  Scott,  Shelley,  Tennyson,  Wordsworth. 
In  preparation:  Byron,  Dryden,  Herbert,  Shakespeare, 
Spenser. 

Globe  Edition.  Macmillan  Co.  With  introductions  and  sometimes 
glossaries.  Contains  .\rnold,  E.  B.  Browning,  Robert  Brown- 
ing (two  volumes),  Burns,  Chaucer,  Coleridge,  Cowper,  Dryden, 
Goldsmith  (miscellaneous  works),  Malory,  Milton,  Pope, 
Scott,  Shelley,  Shakespeare,  Spenser,  Tennyson,  Wordsworth. 

Oxford  Poets.  Henry  Frowde,  Clarendon  Press.  Edited,  with 
introductions  and  notes.  Burns,  Byron,  Chaucer,  Keats, 
Milton,   Scott,   Shakespeare,   Shelley,   Wordsworth. 

Series  of  Classics  Ad.\pted  to  School  Use. 

(Abbreviations,  to  be  used  in  the  references  below,  are  given  first.) 

A.  P.  S.  The  Athenaeum  Press  Scries.     Ginn  &  Co. 

B.  L.  S.  Belles  Lettres  Series.     Heath  &  Co. 

C.  P.  S.  Clarendon    Press    Series.     The    Clarendon    Press,    Oxford. 
Eng.  R.  English  Readings.     Holt  &  Co. 

Eng.  C.     English  Classics.     Macmillan. 

Lake  E.  C.     Lake  English  Classics.     Scott,  Foresman  &  Co. 

Temple   C.     Temple   Classics.     Macmillan    (Dent). 

Cassell.     Cassell's    National    Library.     Texts    modernized. 

R.  L.  S.     Riverside  Literature  Series.     Houghton,  Mifflin  &  Co, 

G.  S.     Gateway  Series.     American  Book  Co. 

Long.     Longman's  English  Classics. 

2.     QUESTIONS  AND  SUGGESTIONS  FOR  STUDY. 

Ch.^pter  I. 

Old  English  Poetry.  Thomas  Arnold's  edition  of  Beowulf 
(Longman's)  contains  the  text,  translation,  and  notes.  A  later  text 
is  A.  J.  Wyatt's  (1894).  An  excellent  prose  translation  is  that  by 
C.  B.  Tinker  (Newson  &  Co.,  N.  Y.).  There  are  rhythmical  transla- 
tions by  James  M.  Garnett  (Ginn  &  Co.)  and  by  John  Lesslie  Hall 
(paper,  D.  C.  Heath  &  Co.),  and  an  edited  translation  by  C.  G.  Child 
in  R.  L,  S.  Parts  are  also  to  be  found  translated  in  Stopford  Brooke's 
Early  English  Literature  and  Morley's  English  Writers,  Vol.  I.     Ex- 


QUESTIONS   AND   SUGGESTIONS   FOR   STUDY  417 

tracts  from  the  original  may  be  found  in  March's  or  Sweet's  Anglo- 
Saxon  Reader. 

An  outline  of  the  story  of  Beowulf  should  be  read  and  then 
several  of  the  best  passages,  for  example,  the  coming  of  the  heroes, 
194-380;  the  swimming-match  with  Breca,  530-580;  the  fight  with 
Grendel,  710-836;  Grendel's  mere,  1357-1379;  the  fight  with  Grendel's 
mother,  1492-1590;  Beowulf's  funeral-pyre,  3100-3184.  Read  also 
the  translation  of  the  Fight  at  Finnsburg,  Brooke's  Early  English 
Literature,  64-65  (also  included  in  Hall's  translation  of  Beowulf) 
The  Wanderer,  The  Seafarer,  Riddles,  Charms,  etc.,  may  be  found 
both  in  Brooke  and  in  Morley  (Vol.  II.).  Read  the  Dream  of  the 
Rood,  Brooke,  440-442. 

Can  you  find  evidence  in  this  early  poetry  of  a  love  of  the  gentler 
aspects  of  nature?  How  far  could  you  localize  the  scene  of  Beowulf 
from  internal  evidence?  Of  what  occupations  do  you  get  hints? 
What  virtues  are  honored?  Find  Christian  interpolations.  Is  war  in- 
dulged in  for  the  love  of  it?  Does  familiarity  with  fighting  diminish 
respect  for  order,  justice,  charity,  or  humanity?  Find  passages 
that  might  be  modern.  Can  you  trace  any  parallels  between  The 
Seafarer  and  Coleridge's  Ancient  Mariner?  Cite  some  modern 
examples  of  English  sea-poetry. 

Define  alliteration  carefully.  In  modern  English  versification 
what  principles  have  been  added  to  those  which  governed  Anglo- 
Saxon  verse?  What  principles  have  been  modified  or  discarded? 
What  influences  have  helped  to  work  the  change?  What  Anglo- 
Saxon  verse  characteristics  appear  in  Longfellow's  Hiawatha? 

Collateral  Reading:  Tennyson's  translation  of  The  Battle  of 
Brunanburh;  The  Exile's  Complaint,  The  Ruined  Wall-Stone,  etc., 
in  Longfellow's  Poets  and  Poetry  of  Europe;  The  Grave,  in  Morley, 
Vol.  II.,  p.  333;  Tennyson's  drama,  Harold;  also  William  Morris's 
prose  romances. 

Chapter  II. 

Old  English  Prose.  Bede's  Ecclesiastical  History,  Alfred's 
Boethius  and  Orosius,  and  the  Anglo-Saxon  Chronicle  may  be  found 
translated  in  Bohn's  Antiquarian  Library. 

Read  Cuthbert's  account  of  the  death  of  Bede  in  Morley's 
Library  of  English  Literature,  or  in  Brooke's  Early  English  Litera- 
ture, pp.  339-340;  also  the  conclusion  of  the  Ecclesiastical  History, 
Encyc.  Brit.,  article  Bede.  Chapter  xxiv.  of  the  History  contains 
the  story  of  Csedmon.  Read  .\lfred's  account  of  the  decay  of  learning 
in  the  preface  to  his  Pastoral  Care,  Brooke's  English  Literature  to 


418  APPENDIX 

the  Norman  Conquest,  p.  64.  Read  his  Boethius,  Preface,  and 
Chapter  xxii.  (Bohn,  p.  257).  In  the  Chronicle,  read  the  entries 
for  the  years  871,  878,  958,  and  1087 

Chapters  III.  and  IV. 

Legends  of  Britain  For  further  accounts  of  Geoffrey  of  Mon- 
mouth, Walter  Map,  and  Layamon,  considt  Saintsbury,  Morley,  etc. 
The  third  volume  of  Morley's  English  Writers  contains  an  outline 
of  the  Brut  (and  also  of  Havelok  the  Dane). 

What  legendary  British  kings  give  the  titles  to  two  of  Shake- 
speare's dramas?  Find  a  passage  in  Milton's  Comus  referring  to 
the  old  British  kings.  What  familiar  American  poem  is  based  on  the 
quest  for  the  Holy  Grail  ?     (All  these  works  afford  collateral  reading.) 

Collateral  reading  for  the  twelfth  century:  Tennyson's  Becket; 
Scott's  Ivanhoe. 

Chapter  V. 

Sir  Gawayne  and  the  Green  Knight,  edited  by  Professor  Skeat 
for  the  Early  English  Text  Society.  The  Pearl,  edited  by  Morris 
for  the  same  (Early  English  Alliterative  Poems) ;  also  by  I.  Gollancz, 
1891.     Editions  of  both  are  promised  in  B.  L.  S. 

Mandeville.  The  standard  edition  of  the  English  translation 
is  the  Voiage  and  Travaile  of  Sir  John  Maundeville,  edited  by  J.  O. 
HalUwell-Phillipps.  A  good  reprint  of  this,  with  modernized  spell- 
ing, is  in  Macmillan's  Library  of  English  Classics.  The  text  in 
Bohn's  Library  and  in  Cassell  is  very  freely  modernized  and  loses 
something  of  the  original  flavor.  Read  the  chapters  about  the  royal 
estate  of  Prester  John  (xxvii.  to  end),  or  read  the  selections  in  Craik, 
Vol.  I.  How  many  strange  words  and  phrases  do  you  find?  In 
what  respects  does  the  style  seem  crude?  Does  the  author  write 
as  if  he  believed  his  stories? 

Wyclif,  Langland,  Gower.  Morris  and  Skeat's  Specimens  of 
Early  English,  Part  II.,  gives  selections  from  all  three  in  the  original 
form.  Selections  from  Wyclif  with  modernized  spelUng  may  be 
found  in  Craik,  I.,  and  from  Langland  and  Gower  in  Ward,  I.  The 
entire  Confessio  Amantis  is  in  Chalmers  and  in  Morley's  Carisbrooke 
Library.  Selections  from  Wyclif's  Bible  may  be  found  in  Old  South 
Leaflets  (Xo.  57)  and  in  Maynard,  Merrill  &  Co.'s  English  Classics. 
Some  portion  of  this  translation  should  be  carefully  compared  with 
t'ue  King  James  version.  Note  especially  such  plurals  as  workis, 
such  verb-forms  as  hungren,  and  such  words  as  agenrisyng  (resur- 
rection). 


QUESTIONS  AND   SUGGESTIONS   FOR  STUDY  419 

Chmicer.  Complete  Works,  ed.'by  W.  W.  Skeat,  6  vols.  The 
Student's  Chaucer,  complete,  with  life  and  glossary,  by  the  same, 
1  vol.  The  Canterbury  Tales,  ed.  by  A.  W.  Pollard,  2  vols.  Same, 
annotated  and  accented,  by  John  Saunders,  1  vol.  The  Prologue, 
Knightes  Tale,  and  Nonne  Preestes  Tale,  by  Morris  and  Skeat 
(Clarendon  Press).  Selections,  with  notes  and  glossary,  by  H.  Cor- 
son. Primer  of  Chaucer,  by  Pollard.  Studies  in  Chaucer,  T.  11. 
Lounsbury,  3  vols.  Essay,  by  Lowell.  In  the  Days  of  Chaucer, 
by  Tudor  Jenks. 

For  reading  in  Chaucer,  some  school  text,  like  the  Clarendon 
Press  volume,  or  Corson's  Selections,  is  essential.  The  Prologue  to 
the  Canterbury  Tales  should  be  read  in  part  or  entire;  then  the 
Knightes  Tale  of  Palamon  and  Arcite,  the  first  and  perhaps  the  best 
of  the  twenty-four.  Other  suitable  tales  are  the  Nonne  Preestes 
Tale  (modernized  by  Dryden  as  The  Cock  and  the  Fox),  11.  1-61, 
367-626;  the  Man  of  Lawes  Tale;  and  the  Clerkes  Tale.  Saunders's 
Canterbury  Tales,  with  its  descriptions  and  pictures  of  the  pilgrims, 
will  afford  most  helpful  collateral  reading. 

Practice  carefully  the  pronunciation  and  scansion  of  a  few  lines 
of  the  Tales.  Find  in  the  Prologue  touches  of  the  poet's  humor,  irony, 
or  tenderness.  What  do  you  learn  of  his  attitude  toward  cliivalry? 
Toward  the  Church?  Toward  women?  Toward  tradesmen?  Is 
the  tone  of  the  Knightes  Tale  clas.sical,  or  mediieval?  What  moral 
or  morals  does  it  teach?  What  other  English  writers  have  used 
the  same  story? 

Chapter  VI. 

Hoccleve,  Lydgate.  Works  partially  edited  by  the  Early  English 
Text  Society.  Extracts  from  both  in  Ward,  I.,  in  Arber,  I.,  and 
in  Morris  and  Skeat's  Specimens. 

Ballads.  Percy's  ReUques  of  Ancient  Poetry,  first  published 
in  1765,  founded  on  a  Folio  MS.  WTitten  about  1650.  Scott's  Min- 
strelsy of  the  Scotti-sh  Border,  3  vols.,  1802-3.  Child's  English  and 
Scottish  Popular  Ballads,  5  vols.,  10  parts,  1SS2-9S;  Cambridge  ed., 
1  vol.,  1904.  Allingham's  Ballad  Book.  Gummere's  Old  Englisli 
Ballads,  in  A.  P.  S.  Ward,  I.;  Arbor,  I.  (contains  The  Xut-Brown 
Maid). 

What  varieties  of  stanza  form  do  you  find  in  old  ballads?  What 
is  the  ordinary  line  length?  Can  you  make  the  ver.se  more  regular 
in  metre  and  rhyme  by  applying  the  Chaucerian  rules  for  prommcia- 
tion?  Do  j'ou  find  words  and  phrases  that  you  recognize  as  Scotcli? 
What  is  a  refrain?      Do  ballad  refrains    always  have  a  meaning? 


420  APPENDIX 

What  purpwse  do  they  serve?  •  D<k;.s  tlie  minstrel  ever  speak  in  his 
own  person?  Is  the  narrative  often  varied  by  description,  or  by 
conversation?  Do  you  know  any  modern  ballads?  Does  the  word 
ballad,  as  applied  to  them,  have  a  different  meaning?  If  they  are 
imitations,  how  far  do  they  conform  to  the  old  popular  ballad? 

On  Miracle  Plays  and  Moralities,  see  Ward's  English  Dramatic 
Literature,  Vol.  I.;  Manly 's  Specimens  of  the  Pre-Shaksperean 
Drama,  Vol.  I.  Pollard's  English  Miracle  Plays  contains  an  excel- 
lent Introduction,  besides  specimens  (Noah's  Flood,  Play  of  the 
Shepherds,  Everyman,  etc.)  and  notes. 

Malory.  Fac-simile  reprint  by  O.  Sommer,  3  vols.  The  best 
edition  for  reading  is  that  by  Sir  E.  Strachey,  with  modernized  sp*;!!- 
ing.  It  contains  a  valuable  Introduction.  Books  I.  and  II.,  cd.  by 
C.  G.  Child,  in  R.  L.  S.  Selections  in  Eng.  C.  Specimens  in  Craik,  I. 
Sidney  Lanier's  The  Boy's  King  Arthur  is  an  abridgment. 

Compare  the  description  of  the  passing  of  Arthur  (in  Craik)  with 
Tennyson's  Morte  d'Arthur,  noting  close  imitations  of  the  original 
and  departures  from  it.  Further  comparisons  may  be  made  of  Tenny- 
son's Gareth  and  Lynette,  11.  430  onward,  with  Malory,  VII.; 
Balin  and  Balan  with  Malory,  II.;  Lancelot  and  Elaine  with  Malory, 
XVIII,  vii-xxi.;  etc. 

Dunbar.  Ward,  I;  Arber,  I. — Skelton.  Ward,  I;  Arber,  II; 
Chalmers,  II.     Examples  of  both  in  Skeat's  Specimens. 

Chapter  VII. 

More,  Latimer,  Ascham,  Wyatt,  Surrey.  The  earliest  transla- 
tion of  Utopia  (Robinson's,  1551)  is  reprinted  in  Arber  and  in  the 
Temple  Classics.  A  much  later  translation  is  in  Cassell.  For  Lati- 
mer and  Ascham,  see  Arber's  Reprints  or  CaKsell.  Wyatt  and  Sur- 
rey's Poems  may  be  had  in  the  Riverside  Editi.'o ,  also,  a  large  portion 
of  them  in  Arber's  Reprint  of  Tottel's  Miscellany.  See  also  for  these 
and  all  writers  henceforth  the  standard  books  of  selections,  Craik 
(prose).  Ward  (poetry),  etc. 

Chapter  VIII. 

Spenser.  Complete  Works,  with  Life,  Critical  Essays,  Variant 
Readings,  etc.,  ed.  by  A.  B.  Grosart,  10  (9  published)  volumes. 
Analy.sis  of  Faerie  Quecne,  Bk.  I.,  in  Ruskin's  Stones  of  Venice, 
Vol.  III.,  Appendix  2.  E.ssays  on  Spenser  by  Lowtdl,  Whipph? 
{Atl.  Monthly,  xxi.),  and  Dowden  (Transcripts  and  Studies).  For 
Italian  influence  on  English  poetry,  see  Edinburgh  Review,  Jan,  1896. 


QUESTIONS   AND   SUGGESTIONS   FOR  STUDY  421 

Find  Middle  English  forms  in  Spenser's  poems  (see  F.  Q.  I.  v. 
3,  44,  etc.)  and  otherwise  illustrate  his  use  of  archaic  language. 
What  is  the  Spenserian  stanza?  What  later  poets  have  used  it? 
What  is  the  meaning  of  the  opening  five  lines  of  the  Faerie  Queene? 
Of  the  fourth  stanza?  Do  you  find  allegory  interesting?  Is  it  an 
effective  means  of  teaching  morality?  What  drawbacks  are  there 
to  the  enjoyment  of  the  Faerie  Queene?  What  does  Macaulay  mean 
by  saying  "Very  few  and  very  weai-y  are  those  who  are  in  at  the  death 
of  the  Blatant  Beast"  (which,  however,  does  not  die)?  Is  this  a 
damaging  criticism?  Compare  Despair  and  his  cave  (I.  ix.)  with 
Bunyan's  Giant  Despair  (see  Lowell's  essay). 

Sidney.  Poems,  ed.  by  Dr.  Grosart.  Arcadia,  reprinted  by 
Dr.  Sommer.  Enough  of  the  Astrophel  and  Stella  sonnets,  and  of 
the  work  of  the  Sonneteers  generally,  may  be  found  in  Ward.  For 
a  fuller  collection  of  the  lyric  verse  of  the  period  see  Bullen's  Eliza- 
bethan Lyrics. 

Chapter  IX. 

The  Early  Drama.  Manly's  Specimens  of  the  Pre-Shaksperean 
Drama  contains  Interludes  (Vol.  I.),  Roister  Doister,  Gammer  Gur- 
ton's  Needle,  Gorboduc,  etc  (Vol.  II.).  The  two  comedies  are  also 
in  Representative  English  Comedies,  ed.  by  C.  M.  Gayley. 

Marlowe.  Plays  in  the  Mermaid  Series.  The  most  important 
for  reading  or  study  is  Dr.  Faustus,  which  may  be  found  in  the  Tem- 
ple Dramatists,  or  in  Morley's  Universal  Library.  For  criticiom,  see 
Ward's  History,  Vol.  I.,  Symonds's  Shakspere's  Predecessors, 
Lowell's  Old  English  Dramatists,  Dowden's  Transcripts  and  Studies 

Shakespeare.  Furness's  Variorum  Shakespeare  (twelve  plays) 
is  the  best  edition  for  exhaustive  study  of  the  plays  included  in  it. 
Clark  and  Wright's  Cambridge  Shakespeare,  9  vols.,  is  most  useful 
for  comprehensive  textual  and  critical  study;  it  contains  the  authori- 
tative text.  A  good  reading  edition  is  the  Temple  Shakespeare. 
Good  .school  texts  are  those  of  Rolfe,  Hudson,  Wright,  the  Arden, 
The  Neilson  Shakspere  in  Lake  Eng.  C  ,  and  the  Temple  School 
Shakespeare.  Abbott's  Shakespearian  Grammar.  Schmidt's  Shake- 
peare  Lexicon,  Bartlett's  Concordance. 

Sidney  Lee's  Life;  Dowden's  Shakspere  Primer,  Introduction  to 
Shakspere,  and  Shakspere,  His  Mind  and  Art;  Hudson's  Life,  .\rt, 
and  Characters;  Moulton's  Shakespeare  as  a  Dramatic  .Artist;  Cole- 
ridge's Lectures;  Lowell's  e.ssay  in  My  Study  Windows.  In  the  Days 
of  Shakespeare,  by  Tudor  Jenks. 


422  APPENDIX 

Dcliiic  aiul  illustrati'  tlio  toriu.s  coincdi/,  ronnintic  cuincdij, 
tragedy,  chronicle  play.  What  are  some  of  tho  sources  of  Shake- 
speare's plays?  How  wide  a  range  of  history  and  life  do  they  cover? 
What  occupations  in  life  have  representation  among  the  characters? 
Sel(>ct  one  (that  of  physician,  astrologer,  hostler,  cobbler),  and  study 
Shakespeare's  knowledge  of  the  occupation  and  his  conception  of  the 
characters  that  pursue  it.  Is  the  utterance  of  folly  the  especial 
office  of  the  fool?  What  female  characters  are  celebrated,  and  for 
what  charms  or  virtues?  Into  what  plays  does  an  element  of  the 
supernatural  enter?  Gather  and  examine  a  few  words  used  in  an 
archaic  or  obsolete  sense  (e.  g.,  owe,  tise,  purchase,  admire,  require, 
engine,  relish,  speculation,  brave,  weird,  timely).  What  variations 
are  there  from  the  blank  verse  in  which  the  bulk  of  the  dramas  is 
composed?  Are  such  variations  to  be  found  in  classical  Greek  and 
French  plays?  What  are  some, of  the  metrical  tests  which  help  to 
determine  whether  a  play  was  written  early  or  late?  Find  (with  the 
help  of  a  Concordance)  what  Shakespeare  says  of  May-Day ;  of  the 
primrose,  rosemary,  violet;  of  the  cuckoo,  lark,  swallow,  owl,  night- 
ingale. Consider  his  figurativeness  by  noting  to  how  many  things 
and  how  aptly  he  applies  the  figure  of  a  book,  a  cloud,  etc.,  or  by 
noting  under  what  figures  he  speaks  of  life,  love,  death,  etc.  Collect 
his  sayings  about  sleep,  dreams,  madness,  hope,  charity. 

(These  are  but  a  few  very  general  questions  and  suggestions. 
The  really  vital  points  in  the  study  of  Shakespeare, — the  development 
of  character,  etc., — can  be  pursued  only  in  connection  with  special 
plays,  and  must  be  left  to  the  text-books  of  the  various  plays.) 

Jonson.  The  old  standard  edition  of  his  works  was  Gifford's. 
A  new  edition  in  nine  volumes  has  been  edited  by  Herford  and 
Simpson  for  the  Clarendon  Press.  The  Alchemist,  ed.  by  Schelling, 
in  B.  L.  S.  Volpone,  The  Alchemist,  The  Silent  Woman,  The  Sad 
Shepherd,  and  a  few  poems,  in  Morley's  Univ;  Libr.;  Masques  and 
Entertainments  in  Morley's  Carisbrooke  Libr.  Symonds's  Ben 
Jonson.  Critical  chapters  on  Jonson  in  Ward's  English  Dramatic 
Literature  and  Symonds's  Shakspere's  Predecessors.  A  Study  of 
Ben  Jonson,  by  Swinburne.  Read  Herrick's  An  Ode  for  Ben  Jonson, 
in  Hesperides. 

Consult  a  dictionary  for  the  derivation  of  "humour,"  and  further 
exemplify  the  dramatic  humour  from  Jonson's  plays. 

Beaumont  and  Fletcher.  Ed.  by  Darley,  2  vols.;  by  Dyce,  11 
vols.  Plays  in  preparation  in  B.  L.  S. — Webster.  Ed.  by  Dyce,  1 
vol.  The  White  Devil  and  Duchess  of  Malfi  in  B.  L.  S.  Selections 
from  both  in  the  Mermaid  Series. 


QUESTIONS   AND   SUGGESTIONS   FOR   STUDY  423 

Chapteu  X. 

Lyhj.  Euphucs  in  Arbor's  English  Reprints.  Syniunds's  Sliak- 
spere's  Predecessors,  cap.  xiii. 

Hooker.     Ecclesiastical  Polity,  Book  I.,  in  C.  P.  S. 

Bacon.  Advancement  of  Learning  in  Cassell.  Harmony  of  the 
Essays,  Arber's  Reprints.  Essays,  ed.  by  A.  S.  West,  Pitt  Press 
Series;  also  in  Temple,  Cassell,  etc. 

Analyze  one  of  the  essays  (e.  g.,  Of  Studies,  Of  Envy,  Of  Great 
Place)  and  see  whether  it  can  be  readily  outlined.  Examine  the 
vocabulary  for  archaic  or  unusual  words.  Do  you  find  points  of 
similarity  between  Bacon's  English  and  that  of  the  Bible?  What 
comparisons  does  he  make,  and  what  figures  of  speech  does  he  em- 
ploy? What  do  you  learn  about  his  own  reading?  Find  an  essay 
that  does  not  deal  with  abstract  ideas. 

Chapter  XI. 

Herrick.  Editions  in  The  Muses'  Library  and  Alpine  Poets. 
A  nearly  complete  edition  in  Morlej^'s  L'niv.  Libr.  Arranged  selec- 
tions by  Palgrave  in  the  Golden  Treasury  Series. 

For  the  Caroline  Poets  generally,  see  Ward's  English  Poets, 
Vol.  II.  Lovelace's  To  Althea  from  Prison  and  Cowley's  The  Chroni- 
cle may  be  read.  Dr.  Johnson's  essay  on  Cowley,  the  first  in  his 
Lives  of  the  Poets,  is  more  read  than  Cowley's  works.  On  the  epoch 
of  "conceits"  see  Arnold's  Manual  of  English  Literature,  160-164; 
Morley's  First  Sketch  of  English  Literature,  526-532;  Taine,  I. 
201-206. 

Taylor's  Holy  Living  and  Holy  Dying,  Browne's  Religio  Medici, 
and  Walton's  Complete  Angler  are  all  in  Cassell.  Browne's  Urn- 
Burial  is  included  with  the  Religio  Medici  in  Temple  C.  Read  in 
Walton  the  otter-hunt,  chapter  ii.,  the  milkmaid  passage,  chapter 
iv.,  the  gipsy  scene,  chapter  v.,  and  the  conclusion.  Note  the  writer's 
laxity  in  grammar  and  syntax,  and  the  ingenuous  prolixity  of  his 
style.  In  Charles  Lamb's  works  may  be  found  a  collection  of  Ful- 
ler's best  sayings. 

Milton.  Poetical  Works,  ed.  by  Professor  Masson,  3  vols.; 
Prose  Works  in  Bohn,  5  vols.  Selections  from  poems  in  Lake  E.  C, 
Holt's  Eng.  R.,  etc.  Areopagitica  and  Letter  on  Education  in 
Cassell.  Life  by  Masson,  in  6  vols.  Life  and  Works,  by  W.  P. 
Trent.  For  early  essays  on  Milton,  see  Addison's  Spectator  Papers, 
Johnson's  Lives  of  the  Poets,  and  Macaulay's  essays;  for  later,  sev 
Emerson's,  Lowell's,  and  Arnold's  essays;  Dowden's  Transcripts  and 
Studies;  Raleigh's  Milton.     Introduction  to  Milton,  by  H.  Corson. 


424  APPENDIX 

Whence  does  the  Areopagitica  derive  its  title?  What  events  in 
history  were  the  occasion  of  its  writing?  Find  and  read  in  it  the 
famous  passage  about  "that  immortal  garland,"  and  "our  sage  and 
serious  poet,  Spenser;"  also  the  passage  beginning,  "Methinks  I  see 
in  my  mind  a  noble  and  puissant  nation."  Note  the  connection  of 
the  latter,  and  mark  in  the  passage  the  characteristics  of  Milton's 
prose  style  as  opposed,  say,  to  Bacon's,  or  to  Walton's,  or  as  com- 
pared with  Burke's. 

From  what  source  does  Milton  get  the  images  tised  in  L' Allegro 
and  II  Penseroso?  Why  has  he  used  Italian  titles?  Is  there  any 
moral  in  the  p)oems?  Can  you  trace  anything  in  Comus  or  Lycidas 
to  Puritan  opinions  and  ideals?  Do  you  find  anything  foreign  to 
those  ideals  as  you  have  conceived  them?  What  do  you  think  of 
Dr.  Johnson's  opinion  of  Lycidas,  that  "the  diction  is  harsh,  the 
rhymes  uncertain,  and  the  numbers  unpleasing?" 

Passages  of  exceptional  interest  or  p)ower  in  Paradise  Lost  are 
the  description  of  the  Council  of  the  fallen  angels  in  the  first  book, 
the  journey  through  Chaos  in  the  second,  the  invocation  to  Light 
in  the  third,  the  description  of  Paradise  in  the  fourth,  the  celebration 
of  Creation  in  the  seventh,  the  Temptation  in  the  ninth,  and  the 
Expulsion  in  the  last.  Read  aloud.  Study  to  discover  just  what  is 
meant  by  the  inversion  and  involution  of  Milton's  style.  Find  a  passage 
that  seems  to  be  a  mere  riot  of  names.  Find  descriptions  of  morning 
and  evening.  Cite  from  the  poem  evidences  of  Milton's  knowledge  of 
mathematics  and  astronomy;  of  his  fondness  for  music.  Find  a 
passage  that  is  sublime  in  sheer  imaginative  sweep;  one  that  is  sub- 
lime from  moral  loftiness. 

Collateral  reading:  Macaulay's  Conversation  between  Mr. 
Abraham  Cowley  and  Mr.  John  Milton,  touching  the  great  Civil 
War;  Landor's  Imaginary  Conversations  (Southey  and  Landor); 
Wordsworth's  Sonnet  on  Milton;  Longfellow's  Sonnet  on  Milton. 

Chapter  XII. 

Pepys.  Pepys's  Diary  is  published  in  Cassell.  It  will  be  in- 
teresting to  compare  the  description  of  the  great  fire  of  1666,  in  vol- 
ume vi.,  with  that  in  Evelyn's  Diary  (Cassell,  New  Series,  vol.  xi.). 

Bunyan^  Works  edited  by  Off  or,  3  vols.  Pilgrim's  Progress 
and  Grace  Abounding  in  C.  P.  S.  Pilgrim's  Progress  in  R.  L.  S.,  in 
Golden  Treasury  Series,  etc.  Grace  Abounding  in  Cassell.  Essay 
by  Macaulay.     Sketch  in  Green's  History  of  the  English  People. 

Find  evidence  in  The  Pilgrim's  Progress  that  Bunyan  was  familiar 
with  a  soldier's  life.     Trace  some  of  the  inconsistencies  in  the  allegory 


QUESTIONS   AND   SUGGESTIONS   FOR  STUDY  425 

which  are  pointed  out  by  Macaulay.  Where  does  Bunyaii  get  liis 
style?  Is  it  simpler  than  Walton's?  Does  Walton's  seem  con- 
sciously literary  by  the  side  of  it?  Find  examples  of  homely  EngUsh 
idioms;  of  vivid  and  spontaneous  figures.  Why  should  mountains 
be  portrayed  "vaguely  and  conventionally"  in  Bunyan's  work? 
Trace  in  detail  the  allegorical  significance  of  one  or  two  episodes. 

Dry  den.  Works,  Scott's  edition,  re-edited  by  Saintsbury,  18 
vols.  Select  Poems,  C.  P.  S.  Selected  essays,  C.  P.  S.  Essays  on 
the  Drama,  Eng.  R.  Discourses  on  Satire  and  on  Epic  Poe>try  in 
Cassell.  Essays  by  Hazlitt,  Macaulay,  Lowell  (Among  my  Books), 
ColUns,  and  Masson.     See  also  Dr.  Johnson's  Lives  of  the  Poets. 

One  of  the  best  ways  of  getting  at  the  specific  characteristics  of 
Dryden's  verse  is  to  compare  a  portion  of  his  Palamon  and  Arcite 
(Lake  E.  C.)  with  Chaucer's  Knightes  Tale.  The  peculiar  force, 
however,  of  his  neat,  epigrammatic  couplet  is  better  seen  in  the 
satires.  Discover  any  couplets  that  have  become  familiar  in  quo- 
tation (See  Absalom  and  Achitophel,  Prologue  to  The  Tempest, 
and  Lines  Under  Mr.  Milton's  Picture).  In  what  senses  was  the 
word  "wit"  used  in  Dryden's  day?  Illustrate  from  his  poetry  or 
prose.  Does  Dryden's  prose  (as  seen  in  the  later  Discourses,  On 
Satire,  1692,  and  On  Epic  Poetry,  1697)  seem  to  you  to  differ  from 
Milton's  prose  more  or  less  than  Macaulay 's  difiFers  from  Dryden's? 
How  much  time  intervenes  between  their  respective  dates?  In 
what  respects  is  Dry  den  more  modern  than  Milton?  Is  he  more 
modern  than  Bunyan?  Is  he  as  imaginative  as  either?  Is  Words- 
worth's stricture  about  his  lack  of  images  from  nature  just? 

Chapter  XIII. 

Swift.  Works,  ed.  by  T.  Scott.  Also  in  Bohn's  Library. 
Selections  in  C.  P.  S.;  Carisbrooke  Library;  Camelot  Classics;  Eng. 
R.  Gulliver's  Travels  in  Macmillan's  Pocket  Classics.  Life,  by 
J.  C.  Collins.  See  also  Dr.  Johnson's  Lives.  Essays  by  Thackeray 
(English  Humorists)  and  A.  Dobson  (Eighteenth  Century  Vignettes). 

Define  satire.  Distinguish  between  irony  and  sarcasm.  May 
Swift  be  said  to  employ  both  in  his  satire?  Find  an  example  in  his 
work  of  good-natured  humor.  Show  the  satirical  purpose  of  some 
incident  in  Gulliver's  Travels.  Who  were  the  Big-endians?  Does 
the  style  of  the  book  seem  sufficiently  lik(!  that  of  Robinson  Crusoe 
to  place  them  near  the  same  date? 

Steele  and  Addison.  Essays  in  British  Es.sayi.sts.  Addison's 
Works,  ed.  by  Tickell;  selected  pownis  in  Ward.  The  Spectator,  ed. 
by  Henry  Morley.     Selections  from  the  Spectator  in  .\.  P.  S.,  C.  P. 


420  APPENDIX 

S.,  Golden  Treasury,  R.  L.  S.,  and  other  scries.  The  Sir  Roger  de 
Covcrlcy  Papers,  ed.  by  Abbott  in  Lake  E.  C.  (excellent  introduction 
on  the  life  of  the  times).  Life  of  Steele,  by  Aitken.  See  also  John- 
son's Lives,  Macaulay's  Essays  and  Thackeray's  English  Humorists. 

For  an  exact  reprint  of  a  Spectator  essay,  see  C.  P.  S.  selections 
from  Addison,  paper  No.  35.  The  same  and  succeeding  papers 
(58-62)  may  be  studied  for  Addison's  idea  of  "wit."  Papers  com- 
mended by  Macaulay  as  showing  Addison's  varied  excellence  are 
Nos.  26,  329,  69,  317,  159,  343,  517.  Note  the  relative  proportion 
of  "observations"  and  "reflections"  in  several  essays,  and  consider 
whether  the  Spectator  could  be  better  named.  Give  examples  of 
the  tendency  to  generalize.  Examine  the  Spectator's  attitude 
toward  the  theatre;  the  church;  fashionable  life.  Is  there  any  evi- 
dence of  a  Whig  bias?  Show,  if  you  can,  that  Addison's  satire  is 
more  severe  than  Steele's.  Find  evidences  in  the  essays  of  Addison's 
scholarship;  of  Steele's  roystcring.  Make  a  list  of  stock  phrases 
affected  by  the  essayists.  Find  examples  of  this  style  in  Thack- 
eray's Henry  Esmond. 

Pope.  Works,  ed.  by  Elwin  and  Courthope,  with  life,  11  vols. 
Essay  on  Man,  etc.,  in  C.  P.  S.  Portions  of  the  translation  of  the 
lUad,  in  Lake  E.  C,  etc.  Essays  by  De  Quincey  and  Thackeray 
(English  Humorists).     See  also  Dr.  Johnson's  Lives  of  the  Poets. 

Examples  of  Pope's  poetry  at  its  best  are  the  speech  of  Sarpedon 
to  Glaucus,  Iliad,  Bk.  XII.;  the  conclusion  of  the  Dunciad  (see 
Johnson's  opinion,  Boswell's  Johnson,  year  1769);  and  the  character 
of  Atticus  in  the  Epistle  to  Dr.  Arbuthnot.  Read  Essay  on  Criti- 
cism, 11.  52-91,  for  Pope's  idea  of  what  it  is  to  "follow  Nature." 
Find  examples  of  his  conventional  treatment  of  outdoor  nature. 
Compare  his  Temple  of  Fame  with  the  second  and  especially  the  tliird 
book  of  Chaucer's  House  of  Fame,  of  which  it  is  partly  an  imitation. 
Which  seems  to  you  the  more  poetic?  Recall,  or  find  some  of 
Pope's  famous  lines  and  couplets  (on  fools,  vice,  order,  charms  and 
merit,  an  honest  man,  the  use  of  words,  a  little  learning,  etc.). 

On  the  period,  consult  Ashton's  Social  Life  in  the  Reign  of  Queen 
Anne,  Lecky's  History  of  England  in  the  Eighteenth  Century;  Ste- 
phen's History  of  Thought  in  the  Eighteenth  Century.  Collateral 
reading,  Thackeray's  Henry  Esmond,  which  is  written  in  an  imita- 
tion of  eighteenth  century  style. 

Chapter  XIV. 

The  Novel.  Dunlap's  History  of  Prose  Fiction  (Bohn).  Jusse- 
r^nd's  English  Novel  in  the  time  of  Shakespeare.     Raleigh's  The 


QUESTIONS   AND   SUGGESTIONS   EOlt   STUDY  427 

Eliglisli  Novel  (U)  Wavcrlcy).  Cros-s's  Dcvclopiunil  of  llic  Eiigii^ih 
Novel.  Stoddard's  Evolution  of  the  English  Novel  (for  distinctions 
between  the  Romance,  the  Historical  Novel,  the  Novel  of  Purpose 
and  the  Novel  of  Problem).  Simonds's  Introduction  to  the  Study 
of  Enghsh  Fiction  (with  selections  from  Sidney,  Lodge,  Defoe, 
Richardson,  Fielding,  Sterne). 

Name  some  early  English  metrical  tales.  Would  any  of  them, 
turned  into  prose,  yield  a  novel,  as  distinguished  from  a  romance'.' 
In  what  respects  is  a  novel  like  a  drama?     In  what  does  it  diflfer? 

Defoe.  Edition  of  the  Novels,  by  Aitkin,  12  vols.  Ahso  an 
edition  in  Bohn.  Journal  of  the  Plague  Year  in  Morley's  L'niv. 
Libr.  and  Temple  C.  Robinson  Crusoe  in  many  editions  (a  good  reprint 
of  Stothard's  1820  edition  is  issued  by  Longmans).  Essay  by  Leslie 
Stephen  (Hours  in  a  Library). 

The  Novelists.  Richard.son's  works  are  pubhshed  by  Sotheran; 
small  type  editions  by  Routledge  and  by  Holt.  Fielding's  and 
Smollett's  works  are  in  Bohn's  Library.  The  best  edition  of  Fielding 
is  edited  by  Saintsbury;  Voyage  to  Lisbon  in  Ca-ssell.  Smollett's 
works  are  edited  by  Henley,  12  vols.  Sterne's  works  are  edited  by 
Saintsbury;  a  good  edition  also  in  Macmillan's  Library  of  English 
Classics,  2  vols.;  also  in  Temple  C;  Tristam  Shandy  in  Morley's 
Univ.  Libr.  Mackenzie's  Man  of  Feeling,  Walpole's  Castle  of  Otranto, 
and  Beckford's  Vathek,  in  Cassell.  Essays  on  Richardson  and 
Fielding  by  L.  Stephen  and  A.  Dobson;  on  Fielding  by  Lowell  (De- 
mocracy, etc.);  On  Fielding,  Smollett,  and  Sterne,  by  Thackeray 
(English  Humorists). 

Select  a  passage  from  Robinson  Crusoe  exhibiting  minute  real- 
ism. Can  you  find  any  that  does  not?  Cite  an  instance  of  Crusoe't 
piety;  of  his  inventive  ingenuity.  Why  is  it  impossible  that  this 
tale  should  afford  the  best  kind  of  character  study?  What  cele- 
brated character  of  Fielding's  recalls  one  of  Addison's?  Have  you 
ever  come  across  references  to  any  of  these  characters  in  your  general 
reading?  What  would  be  some  of  the  difficulties  of  writing  a  novel 
wholly  in  the  letter  form?  What  late  writers  have  imitated  the 
early  rogue  or  adventure  stories?  To  what  class  of  fiction  has  the  re- 
lation of  practical  jokes  now  been  relegated?  Do  you  know  of  any 
novel,  properly  so  called,  in  which  romantic  love  is  not  an  element"; 
Ch.\pter  XV. 

Johnson.  Selected  E.ssays  in  Camelot  Series.  Ra.sselas  in  C. 
P.  S.,  Morley's  l'niv.  Libr.,  Eng.  R.,  Cas.sell,  etc.  Lives  of  the 
Poets,   pub.    by    Mcthuen;   also   in   Ciissell.     Poems   in    Ward,   «'tc. 


428  APPENDIX 

The  great  Life  is  of  course  Boswcll's;  ed.  by  G.  Birkbcck  Hill,  Henry 
Morley,  or  M.  Morris  (Macmillan's  Engl.  Classics);  also  in  Temple 
C.  An  abridged  one- volume  ed.  is  published  by  Holt  &  Co.  Essays 
by  Macaulay  and  Stephen. 

In  what  respects  does  Rasselas  fail  of  realism?  Does  the  escape 
of  the  Prince  from  the  Happy  Valley  have  the  interest  of  either  plot 
or  adventure?  Why?  What  is  its  general  teaching  in  regard  to 
the  search  for  human  happiness?  Are  any  of  Johnson's  own  experi- 
ences reflected  in  the  book?  Find  in  Boswell's  Life  of  Johnson 
opinions  similar  to  those  expressed  in  Rasselas.  Find,  in  the  same, 
anecdotes  illustrating  Johnson's  peculiarities  of  character — his 
seeming  harshness,  his  kindness,  liis  prejudices,  his  justice,  his  rea- 
sonableness, his  critical  discernment,  etc. 

Goldsmith.  Misc.  Works,  ed.  by  Masson,  Globe  edition.  Vicar 
of  Wakefield,  Poems,  and  Plays,  in  Morley 's  Univ.  Libr.;  the  first 
also  in  various  school  editions  (Lake  E.  C,  Longmans,  etc.).  Plays 
in  .Cassell;  She  Stoops  to  Conquer  in  Macmillan's  Pocket  Classics. 
Essays  by  Macaulay,  Thackeray  (Engl.  Humorists),  Dobson. 

How  does  Goldsmith's  view  of  happiness  as  set  forth  in  the 
conclusion  of  The  Traveller  differ  from  Johnson's  in  Rasselas?  Is 
Goldsmith's  doctrine  too  sweeping?  Is  the  reasoning  of  The  De- 
serted Village,  that  increase  of  wealth  and  luxury  means  decrease 
of  national  strength,  sound  political  economy?  Find  some  often 
quoted  couplets.  How  does  the  Vicar  of  Wakefield  set  forth  the 
same  ideals  as  the  pwems? 

Sheridan.  The  Rivals  and  School  for  Scandal  in  Cassell;  in 
Morley's  Univ.  Libr. 

Burke.  Select  works,  ed.  by  E.  J.  Payne,  3  volumes.  Selections 
in  Eng.  R.  and  Cassell.  Essay  on  the  Sublime  and  Beautiful  in 
Cassell  and  Temple  C.  Speech  on  Conciliation,  ed.  by  Denney,  Lake 
E.  C.  Essay  by  Birrell  (Obiter  Dicta).  See  also  Macaulay 's  War- 
ren Hastings,  Thackeray's  Four  Georges. 

Verify,  by  examination  of  some  pages  of  Burke,  J.  R.  Green's 
description  of  his  oratory — "its  passionate  ardor,  its  poetic  fancy, 
its  amazing  prodigality  of  resources;  the  dazzling  succession  in  which 
irony,  pathos,  invective,  tenderness,  the  most  brilliant  word-pictures, 
the  coolest  argument  followed  each  other."  Note  Burke's  frequent 
and  happy  quotations.  Find  a  saying  of  his  own  that  is  often 
quoted. 

Thomson,  Collins,  Gray.  The  works  of  the  first  two  are  in  the 
Aldine  Edition.  Gray  Jias  been  edited  by  Gosse,  4  vols.  Excellent 
edition  of  each  (Collins  complete)   in  A.  P.  S.;  Gray  and  Collins  in 


QUESTIONS  AND   SUGGESTIONS   FOR  STUDY  429 

Chandos  Classics.  For  selections,  see  Ward.  Essay  on  C'oIUils  bv 
Swinburne  (Miscellanies),  Essay  on  Gray  by  Arnold,  Lowell, 
Dobson,  and  Stephen. 

Compare  the  opening  stanzas  of  the  Castle  of  Indolence  with  the 
description  of  the  House  of  Morpheus,  Spenser's  Faerie  Queene,  I. 
I.  39-41.  Also  with  Tennyson's  Lotos-Eaters.  Would  Collins's 
Ode  to  Evening  be  better  or  more  popular  if  it  were  rhymed?  Do 
you  find  any  reminiscences  of  Milton  in  it?  Do  you  find  such  in 
Gray's  Elegy?  Apart  from  rhyme,  is  the  latter  poem  more  musical? 
More  conventional?  More  realistic?  More  imaginative?  More 
melancholy?  Is  nature  described  for  its  own  sake,  or  used  rather 
as  a  background  for  moralization? 

Cowper.  Works,  ed.  by  Southey,  15  vols.,  1836-37.  Selections, 
including  The  Task,  ed.  by  J.  O.  Murray,  in  A.  P.  S.  Selections  also 
in  Cassell.  Life  by  Thomas  Wright.  Essays  by  Leslie  Stephen, 
W.  Bagehot,  A.  Dobson. 

With  what  familiar  line  does  one  of  the  books  of  The  Task  open  ? 
Find  a  couplet  in  The  Task  that  sounds  like  Pope.  Find  a  passage 
that  is  very  different  in  manner,  and  explain  the  difference.  Read 
Mrs.  Browning's  poem,  Cowper's  Grave. 

ChaMerton,  Crabbe,  Blake.  Poetical  works  in  Aldine  edition,  and 
in  Canterbury  Poets.  Selections  in  Ward's  English  Poets.  Selec- 
tions from  Crabbe  in  Cassell;  The  Borough,  in  Temple  C. 

Bums.  Centenary  edition  of  poetry,  4  vols.  Selection.s  in 
A.  P.  S.  and  B.  L.  S.  Essays  by  Carlyle  and  Stevenson;  by  W.  Haz- 
litt,  on  Bums  and  the  old  English  Ballads  (Lectures  on  the  English 
Poets);  by  Hawthorne,  on  the  Haunts  of  Burns  (Our  Old  Home). 
Poems  on  Burns  by  Wordsworth,  and  Longfellow. 

Name  several  songs  by  Burns  written  in  pure  English.  In  wiiat 
is  the  Cotter's  Saturday  Night  written?  In  what  stanza  form? 
What  are  several  of  Burns's  favorite  stanza  forms?  Make  sure  you 
understand  the  construction  and  meaning  of  the  last  stanza  of  To  a 
Louse.  What  American  poet  is  like  Burns  in  simplicity  and  lyric 
ease?  What  Irish  singer  of  melodies  has  some  points  of  similarity? 
Why  does  this  universally  familiar  popular  p)oetry  not  rank  as  the 
greatest  literature?  What  kind  of  life  does  Burns  chiefly  celebrate? 
Would  you  call  him  democratic?  Do  you  suppose  he  sympathized 
with  the  Revolution  in  France? 

Chapter  XVI. 

Wordsworth.  Works,  ed.  by  Knight,  in  8  volumes;  Life,  3  vols. 
The  best  of  his  poems  have  been  selected  by  Matthew  Arnold  for  the 


480  iiPPENDlA 

Golden  Tniasury  Series.  Selections  also  in  A.  P.  S.,  B.  L.  S.,  and 
Ca.s.soll.  Prefaces  and  Essays,  ed.  by  A,  J.  George,  Essays  by 
Lowell  (Among  my  Books);  by  Pater  (Appreciations);  by  Stephen 
(Hours  in  a  Library). 

Test  some  of  Wordsworth's  poems  of  nature  for  their  descriptive 
truth  and  value.  Does  the  poet  stop  with  the  description  or  go  on  to 
reflection?  Find  instances  of  his  sense  of  close  communion  with 
nature  and  of  nature's  consciousness  (The  Leech-Gatherer,  etc.). 
Find  examples  of  simple  diction ;  of  calling  things  by  their  homely 
names.  Can  you  find  examples  of  stock  poetic  names  also?  Does 
Michael  seem  to  you  too  simple  for  good  poetry?  What  do  you  make 
of  We  are  Seven?  Do  the  poems  on  Lucy  satisfy  Wordsworth's  descrip- 
tion of  poetry  as  having  its  origin  in  "emotion  remembered  in  tran- 
quillity"? Compare  his  poems  To  the  Daisy  (especially  "In  youth 
from  rock  to  rock  I  went")  with  Burns' s  To  a  Mountain  Daisy. 
Read  the  poem  At  the  Grave  of  Burns.  What  two  poets  probably 
influenced  Wordsworth  most?  In  what  poems  do  you  find  the  evi- 
dence of  this  influence? 

Coleridge.  Works,  ed.  by  Shedd,  7  vols.  Poems  and  Dramatic 
Works,  ed.  by  Knight,  1  vol.  Poetical  Works,  ed.  by  J.  D.  Camp- 
bell, 1  vol.;  also  in  Aldine  edition,  Canterbury  Poets,  A.  P.  S.,  and 
B.  L.  S.  Prose  Works  in  Bohn;  Selections  in  Engl.  R.  Essays  by 
Lowell,  Dowden,  Garnett,  Pater,  and  Swinburne. 

What  can  you  learn  of  the  sources  of  the  Ancient  Mariner? 
What  are  its  supernatural  elements?  Has  it  human  interest? 
What  is  the  moral?  What  archaisms  were  used  in  the  1798  edition 
that  were  afterwards  changed?  Were  any  allowed  to  remain? 
Did  Coleridge  write  any  other  ballads?  Does  he  draw  any  romantic 
elements  from  meduEvalism?  Does  he  give  any  realistic  descrip- 
tions of  natural  scenery?  Has  he  written  any  poerns  upon  nature 
alone?  Is  his  diction  as  simple  as  Word.sworth's?  Can  you  detect 
the  influence  of  Christabel  in  Arnold's  Tristram  and  Iseult?  What 
poem  of  Lowell's  shows  the  influence  of  it? 

Soulhey.  Poetical  Works,  pub.  by  Crowell.  Selections  in  Can- 
terbury Poets  and  in  Golden  Treasury  Series.  Life  of  Nelson  in 
Temple  C.  and  in  Cassell. — Campbell.  Poetical  Works,  Aldine 
Edition. — Moore.     Poetical  Works,  in  Canterbury  Poets. 

Byron.  Poetry,  ed.  by  E.  H.  Coleridge,  7  vols.;  Letters  and 
Journals,  ed.  by  II.  E.  Prothero,  6  vols.  Selections,  by  F.  T.  Carpen- 
ter, in  Engl.  II.  Ciiildc  Harold  in  C.  P.  S.  p]s.says  by  Arnold,  Macau- 
lay,  J.  Morlcy,  Swinburne,  Henley,  Paul  E.  More  {Atlantic  MonlkUj, 


QUESTIONS   AND   SUGGESTIONS   FOR   STUDY  431 

December,  1890).  Jeaffresou's  The  Real  Lord  Byron  is  interesting 
but  not  critical. 

Illustrate  Byron's  carelessness  of  style;  his  facility  in  rhyming; 
his  humor;  his  pathos;  his  cynicism.  Examine  the  variety  of  his 
metres.  Do  his  Spenserian  stanzas  sound  like  Spenser's?  Just 
what  is  his  debt  to  Scott?  \Miat  poems  are  founded  on  British 
scenes  or  events?  How  wide  Ls  the  geography,  so  to  speak,  of  his 
poetry?  What  aspects  of  nature  does  he  delight  in?  How  does 
the  reaUsm  of  his  sea  poetry  compare  with  the  Ancient  Mariner  ? 
What  does  Ruskin  mean  by  praising  his  "Uving  truth,"  and  Arnold 
by  praising  his  "sincerity  and  strength"?  Does  he  give  way  to 
sentiment,  or  does  he  seem  to  check  sentimentality  by  deliberate 
mockery?  Illustrate  his  egotism  and  his  cynicism?  What  special 
directions  does  his  "romanticism"  take?  What  passages  of  his 
poems  would  you  select  for  committing  to  memory? 

Shelley.  Works,  ed.  by  H.  B.  Forman,  8  vols.  Works  ed.  by 
Woodberry,  4  vols.  Selections  in  Golden  Treasury  Series.  Essays 
and  Letters  in  Camelot  Series.  Life,  by  Edward  Dowden,  2  vols. 
Essays  by  Dowden,  Shairp,  Swinburne,  Arnold,  Stephen,  and 
Woodberry. 

Shelley's  Adonais  may  be  studied  (and  compared  with  Lycidas) ; 
perhaps  also  his  Sensitive  Plant,  or  his  Ode  to  Naples.  But  analysis 
is  of  little  value,  and  the  time  may  be  better  spent  in  committing 
to  memory  several  stanzas  of  The  Skylark  or  The  West  Wind.  Those 
who  are  familiar  with  succeeding  lyric  poets — Poe,  Tennyson,  Arnold, 
Swinburne, — will  be  interested  to  note  Shelley's  influence  up>on  them, 
which  may  be  readily  traced  from  Alastor  and  a  dozen  other  poems. 

Keats.  Work.s,  ed.  by  H.  B.  Forman,  4  vols.  Golden  Treasury 
Series,  1  vol.  Essays  by  Lowell,  Arnold,  Swinburne,  Masson,  W.  H. 
Hudson. 

Why  is  the  name  "Cockney  School"  sometimes  applied  to 
Keats,  Hunt,  and  their  friends?  What  is  there  in  Keats  akin  to 
Spenser?  to  the  Elizabethans  generally?  Does  he  draw  upon  the 
life  about  him  £j?r  subjects?  Is  his  love  of  nature  as  deep  as 
Wordsworth's?  Docs  it  seem  to  be  genuine?  Are  his  classic 
themes  handled  classically?  Point  out  the  "fine  excess"  in  Endy- 
mion.  Can  you  find  any  fault  with  the  Eve  of  St.  Agnes?  Is  there 
any  important  poetic  form  (line  or  .stanza)  which  Keats  did  not 
employ?  Give  instances  of  his  "run-on  couplets";  of  his  license  in 
rhyme.  Why  is  Hyperion  Miltonic?  Does  Keats  have  any  moral 
to  teach? 


432  APPENDIX 

June  Austen.  Works,  ed.  by  11,  B.  Johnson.  Selections  in 
Craik.  Life,  by  Goldwin  Smith.  Essay  by  H.  H.  Bonnell  ("Char- 
lotte Bronte,  George  Eliot,  Jane  Austen"). 

Scott.  Lady  of  the  Lake,  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel,  and  Mar- 
mion  in  Lake  E.  C,  etc.  Novels  in  many  editions;  Ivanhoe  in 
Lake  E.  C.  Life,  by  J.  G.  Lockhart,  7  vols. ;  by  Saintsbury.  Essays 
by  Carlyle,  Swinburne,  L.  Stephen,  Saintsbury. 

Study  Scott's  treatment  of  nature  in  Canto  III.  of  the  Lady  of 
the  Lake,  and  consult  Ruskin,  Modern  Painters,  III.  xvi.  23-45. 
Does  the  element  of  mystery  enter  into  Scott's  romanticism?  Are 
his  battle  scenes  realistic,  or  conventional?  How  do  his  novels 
compare  with  Cooper's  in  the  proportion  of  description  to  narration 
and  conversation?  Upon  what  "properties"  does  he  depend  for 
mediaeval  color?  Does  he  make  his  heroes  superhumanly  brave  or 
strong  or  noble?  Who  are  Rowena,  Meg  Merrilies,  Dominie  Samp- 
son, Gurth,  Redgauntlet,  Jeanie  Deans?  How  much  of  Ivanhoe 
is  historical?  Name  some  of  Scott's  historical  characters?  Make  a 
report  upon  the  different  periods  and  events  of  history  covered  by 
his  historical  novels.     What  novel  of  the  sea  did  he  write? 

Chapter  XVII. 

Lamb.  Works  of  Charles  and  Mary  Lamb,  ed.  by  E.  V.  Lucas, 
7  vols.  Works  of  Charles  Lamb,  ed.  by  Wm.  Macdonald,  12  vols. 
Essays  of  Elia,  ed.  by  A.  Birrell.  Selections  in  Bell's  English  Classics; 
in  Doubleday  &  McClure's  Little  Masterpieces;  in  R.  L.  S.,  etc. 
Life,  by  E.  V.  Lucas,  2  vols.  Essays  by  De  Quincey,  Pater,  Wood- 
berry. 

De  Quincey 's  Account  of  Lamb  should  be  read.  Among  Lamb's 
essays  to  be  commended  for  reading  arc  New  Year's  Eve,  Mrs.  Bat- 
tle's Opinions  on  Wliist,  The  Old  and  New  Schoolmaster,  Detached 
Thoughts  on  Books  and  Reading,  A  Dissertation  upon  Roast  Pig, 
The  Superannuated  Man,  Dream  Children.  Note  how  the  style  in 
the  last  named  differs  from  that  of  the  others,  and  how  perfectly 
it  is  fitted  to  its  theme.  What  in  general  can  you  say  of  Lamb's 
method?  What  is  the  purpose  of  the  essays?  H^w  did  they  get 
their  collective  name?  Find  a  touch  of  humor  in  the  Dream  Chil- 
dren; of  satire  in  the  Roast  Pig;  a  pun  in  The  Convalescent.  Give 
illustrations  of  his  metaphors,  archaisms,  pedantic  phrases.  Do 
you  know  of  any  later  writer  who  possesses  similar  quaintness  or 
charm? 

De  Quincey.  Collected  Works,  ed.  by  Masson,  14  vols.  Con- 
fessions of  an  English  Opium  Eater,  Camelot  Classics;  Temple  C. 


QUESTIONS  AND   SUGGESTIONS   FOR  STUDY  433 

Reprint  of  first  edition  ed.  by  Garnett,  also  by  H.  Morley.  Joan  of 
Arc  and  English  Mail  Coach,  in  Engl.  R.  Flight  of  a  Tartar  Tribe  in 
Lake  E.  C.  Selections  in  A.  P.  S.  Murder  as  a  Fine  Art,  English 
Mail  Coach,  in  Cassell.  Life  by  H.  A.  Page  (A.  H.  Japp.)  Essays  by 
Birrell,  Masson,  Stephen,  Saintsbury. 

For  the  personal  De  Quincey,  read  the  Autobiographic  Sketches; 
for  the  scholar  and  opium-eater,  read  the  Confesssions.  Any 
analysis  of  De  Quincey  must  be  chiefly  rhetorical,  and  his  vocabu- 
lary, sentences,  and  constructions  generally,  will  afford  abundant 
exercises  and  topics  for  discussion  along  Unes  suggested  m  the  text. 

Landor.  Works,  ed.  by  Forster,  8  vols.;  by  Crump,  10  vols. 
Selections  in  Golden  Treasury  Series,  A.  P.  S.,  Engl.  R.  Life  by 
Forster.  Essays  by  Lowell,  Dowden,  de  Vere,  Swinburne,  Stephen, 
Scudder. 

Conversations  commended  for  reading  are  JEsop  and  Rhodope, 
Marcellus  and  Hannibal,  Tiberius  and  Vipsania,  Peter  the  Great  and 
Alexis,  The  Lady  Lisle  and  Elizabeth  Gaunt,  Leofric  and  Godiva. 
Upon  topics  of  English  literary  interest  are  Queen  Ehzabeth  and 
Cecil,  Essex  and  Spenser,  Lord  Brooke  and  Sir  Philip  Sidney,  Steele 
and  Addison.  * 

Macaulay.  Works,  ed.  by  Lady  Trevelyan,  8  vols.  Numerous 
school  editions  of  selected  essays.  Life,  by  G.  O.  Trevelyan.  Essays 
by  Stephen,  J.  Morley,  Saintsbury. 

Among  the  best  of  Macaulay's  historical  essays  are  those  on 
Clive,  Hastings,  and  Pitt;  of  the  literary  essays,  the  Britannica  arti- 
cles on  Bunyan,  Goldsmith,  and  Johnson.  Of  his  History,  the  third 
chapter  is  well  suited  to  general  reading.  His  mechanical  style 
lends  itself  easily  to  analysis.  Note  the  construction  of  his  sentences, 
his  concreteness,  his  aUusiveness,  his  abimdance  of  illustration,  his 
emphasis  and  exaggeration  (superlatives).  Note  also  his  confidence, 
his  satisfaction  with  the  institutions  and  the  material  progress  of 
his  own  day,  his  sprightliness,  his  love  of  external  pageantry,  his 
limited  appreciation  of  deUcate  shades  of  thought  and  feeling.  Have 
some  one  read  successively  from  each  of  these  four  prose  writers — 
Lamb,  De  Quincey,  Landor,  and  Macaulay — and  see  if  you  can  not 
tell  at  once  who  is  in  each  case  the  author. 

Chapter  XVIII. 

Tennyson.  Works,  Macmillan  ed.,  1  vol,  (containing  the  posthu- 
mous collection.  The  Death  of  (Enone,  etc.);  Cambridge  ed.,  1  vol. 
(without  The  Death  of  ffinone,  but  with  notes,  and  appendix  of  early 
and  suppressed  poems).    Select  Poems,  and  The  Princess,  in  Lake 


4cJ4  APPENDIX 

E  C.  The  Princess,  Maud,  and  In  Memoriam  in  Temple  C.  The 
Princess,  Enoch  Arden,  In  Memoriam,  and  various  Idylls,  in  R.  L.  S. ; 
also  Idylls  complete.  There  are  excellent  commentaries  on  The 
Princess  by  S.  E.  Dawson,  and  on  In  Memoriam  by  Alfred  Gatty, 
E.  R.  Chapman,  G.  F.  Genung,  A.  C.  Bradley,  and  Charles  Mansford. 
On  Tennyson's  works,  see  M.  Luce's  Tennyson  Primer,  and  Hand- 
book, E.  C.  Tainsh's  Study;  Stopford  Brooke's  Tennyson,  His  Art 
and  Relation  to  Modem  Life;  H.  Van  Dyke's  Poetry  of  Tennyson. 
Memoir,  by  Hallam  Tennyson,  2  vols.;  Life,  by  Waugh.  Essays  by 
Dawson,  Hutton,  Gates. 

Tennyson  may  be  further  studied  by  verifying  and  illustrating 
the  statements  or  following  out  the  suggestions  in  the  text.  For 
instance,  interpret  the  autobiography  in  Merlin  and  the  Gleam; 
compare  the  Lotos-Eaters  with  the  opening  stanzas  of  Thomson's 
Castle  of  Indolence;  study  several  of  his  "landscapes";  set  forth  the 
lesson  of  the  Palace  of  Art,  and  of  Ulysses;  name  some  of  his  best 
known  lyrics  that  have  not  been  mentioned  in  the  text;  see  whether 
you  like  the  homeliness  of  such  a  poem  as  Walking  to  the  Mail; 
select  the  best  touches  in  the  Northern  Cobbler;  compare  the  several 
characters  in  The  Princess;  compare  the  hero  of  Locksley  Hall  with 
that  of  Maud;  select  several  of  the  finer  sentiments  and  more  familiar 
lines  from  Locksley  Hall ;  discover  the  symbolism  in  Arthur's  passing, 
and  the  three  queens ;  find  in  In  Memoriam  figures  drawn  from  science 
(in  I  iv.,  for  instance) ;  find  the  firmest  expression  of  faith,  etc.,  etc. 

Browning.  Selections,  ed.  by  Dr.  Rolfe;  by  Miss  Hersey.  Life, 
by  Dowden  (Temple  Biog.);  Life  and  Letters,  by  Mrs.  Sutherland 
Orr.  A  Handbook  to  the  Works  of  Robert  Bro\vning,  by  Mrs. 
Orr.  Introduction  to  the  Study  of  Browning,  by  H.  Corson  (with 
selections);  by  A.  Symons.  The  Browning  Cyclopedia,  by  E.  Ber- 
doe.  The  Poetry  of  Robert  Browning,  by  Stopford  Brooke.  Brown- 
ing as  Poet  and  Man,  by  E  L.  Cary. 

Could  you  get  an  idea  of  the  force  and  originality  of  Browning's 
genius  from  the  titles  of  his  poems?  What  historical  range  do 
they  reveal?  From  what  environment  does  he  usually  choose  his 
scenes  and  characters?  Are  there  any  poems  reflecting  English 
scenery,  life,  or  character?  Study  one  of  his  dramatic  monologues, 
My  Last  Duchess,  for  instance,  and  describe  in  full  the  situations 
and  character  revealed.  Do  his  Prospice  and  Epilogue  and  Tenny- 
son's Crossing  the  Bar  seem  respectively  characteristic  of  their 
authors? 

Mrs.  Browning.  Select  Poems,  Ginn  &  Co.  Letters  of  Robert 
Browning  and  Elizabeth  Barrett  Browning,  2  vols.     Life,  by  J.  H. 


QUESTIONS   AND   SUGGESTIONS   FOR   STUDY  435 

Ingrain.     Essays,    by   E.  W.  Gosse,  A.  C.  Benson,  G.  K.  Chesterton. 

Interesting  poetic  "portraits"  from  Homer  to  Keats,  may  be 
found  in  A  Vision  of  Poets.  Among  the  best  of  the  Sonnets  from  the 
Portuguese  are  Nos.  1,  4,  14,  18,  20,  22,  43.  Justify  the  description 
of  Mrs.  Browning  as  "a  poet  of  humanity,  freedom,  and  enthusiasm" 
(Stedman). 

Fitzgerald.  Variorum  ed.  of  works,  by  F.  Bentham  and  E. 
Gosse,  7  vols.  Letters  and  Literary  Remains,  ed  by  W.  Aldis  Wright, 
3  vols.  Rubaiyat  in  Golden  Treasury  Series.  Among  other  things 
commended  for  reading  are  the  opening  of  the  translation  of  Aga- 
memnon, and  the  whole  of  Such  Stuff  as  Dreams  are  Made  Of  (Calder- 
on's  Life  is  a  Dream). 

Arnold.  Selected  Poems,  in  Golden  Treasury  Series.  (For  his 
prose,  see  below.)  Life,  by  Saintsbury ;  by  G.  W.  E.  Russell.  Es.says 
by  Swinburne,  Hutton,  Woodbcrry,  etc. 

For  a  personal  poem  of  Arnold's,  read  Switzerland;  for  poems 
in  his  lighter  manner.  Kaiser  Dead  and  Geist's  Grave ;  for  an  example 
of  his  stammering  expression  gradually  freeing  itself  as  his  inspira- 
tion grows.  Human  Life;  for  a  lyrical  drama  of  beautiful  separate 
passages,  Tristram  and  Iseult;  for  exalted  philosophy,  the  soliloquy 
of  Empedocles  on  Etna ;  for  pure  classic  beauty,  the  .songs  of  Callicles 
in  the  same  poem  (interesting  to  compare  with  David's  songs  in 
Browning's  Saul);  for  intimate  self -revelation,  Stanzas  from  the 
Grande  Chartreuse. 

Clough.  Poems,  with  Memoir  by  C.  E.  Norton.  Selections,  in 
the  Golden  Treasury  Series;  in  Ward.  Essays  by  Bagehot,  W.  H. 
Hudson,  R.  H.  Hutton. 

Chapter  XIX. 

Dickens.  Works,  Gadshill  ed.,  with  preface  by  A.  Lang.  Life, 
by  J.  Forster,  2  vols.  Essays,  by  F.  Harrison,  W.  Bagehot,  A.  C. 
Swinburne,  Mrs.  Meynell  (Atlantic  Monthly,  Jan.  1903). 

What  traits  does  Dickens  have  in  common  with  Richardson  and 
Sterne?  What  with  Defoe  and  Smollett?  How  does  his  handling 
of  the  elements  of  adventure  and  crime  differ  from  that  of  Defoe  and 
Smollett?  Does  he  go  out  of  England,  or  out  of  the  present,  for 
his  scenes?  Does  he  depict  high  life  or  low  life  best?  Childhood 
or  maturity?  Are  his  characters  impossible  or  only  unusual?  What 
parts  of  David  Copperfield  reflect  his  own  life?  Which  character 
might  represent  his  father?  Describe  some  of  his  more  familiar 
characters  that  have  not  been  mentioned  in  the  text. 


436  APPENDIX 

Thackeray.  Works,  Biographical  Edition  (with  Introductions 
by  Mrs.  Ritchie),  13  vols.  Henry  Esmond  in  Lake  E.  C;  The  English 
Humorists  in  Engl.  R.  Life,  by  Lewis  Melville,  2  vols.  See  also 
Introductions  of  the  Biographical  Edition,  written  by  Mrs.  Ritchie, 
Thackeray's  daughter.     Essays  by  F.  Harrison  and  W.  C.  Brownell. 

Why  may  Thackeray  be  regarded  as  a  di.sciple  of  Fielding? 
In  what  respects  is  he  greater  than  his  teacher?  Is  his  fiction  in  any 
respect  like  Scott's?  Define  a  "snob,"  and  learn  what  you  can  of 
Thackeray's  attitude  toward  snobs.  Define  a  "cynic,"  and  account 
for  the  charges  of  cynicism  that  have  been  brought  against  him. 
Whence  comes  the  name,  "Vanity  Fair,"  and  what  does  it  signify? 
Does  Thackeray,  like  Dickens,  give  his  personages  names  that  fit 
their  characters?  What  marks  of  eighteenth  century  prose  are  to  be 
found  in  Henry  Esmond?  Arc  the  historical  characters  (Steele,  etc.) 
as  well  drawn  as  the  imaginary  ones?  Do  his  stories  tend  to  end 
happily?  What  significance  has  this  in  its  bearing  upon  the  question 
of  realism? 

Kingsley.  Life,  by  M.  Kaufmaiui.  Es.says  by  F.  Harrison  and 
L,  Stephen. 

Bronte.  Works  of  Charlotte,  Emily,  and  Anne,  Haworth  ed.. 
Preface  by  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward,  7  vols.  Life  by  Mrs.  Gaskell;  by 
C.  Shorter.     Essays  by  Swinburne,  L.  Gates,  H.  H.  Bonnell. 

Compare  the  descriptions  of  boarding  school  life  in  Jane  Eyre 
with  those  in  Dickens's  Nicholas  Nickleby.  Does  one  author  seem 
to  write  less  in  love  and  more  in  bitterness  than  the  other?  Is 
Rochester  a  possible  character  ?  Is  it  realism  to  make  descriptions 
of  nature  conform  to  the  feelings  of  the  characters?  Learn  what 
you  can  of  the  mutual  relations  of  Thackeray  and  Mi.ss  Bronte. 

George  Eliot.  Works,  Personal  ed.  (Doubleday  &  Page.) 
Silas  Mamer  in  Lake  E.  C,  etc.  Life,  by  J.  W.  Cross,  3  vols.  Essays, 
by  G.  W.  Cooke,  R.  H.  Hutton,  E.  Dowden,  F.  Harrison,  L.  Stephen, 
W.  C.  Brownell.  H.  H.  Bonnell. 

How  does  the  midland  scenery  of  her  novels  differ  from  that 
of  Miss  Bronte's?  What  other  evidences  of  her  early  environment 
do  her  novels  show?  If  it  be  a  test  of  a  real  character  as  opposed 
to  a  type  that  you  cannot  tell  what  he  or  she  will  do  next,  how  does 
Maggie  Tulliver  compare,  for  instance,  with  Tito  Melema?  Do  the 
novels  leave  a  pleasant  final  impression?  Could  it  be  said  that  they 
teach  something  like  repression  of  the  individual  as  opposed  to  Mis.s 
Bronte's  assertion  of  the  individual? 


QUESTIONS   AND   SUGGESTIONS   FOR   STUDY  .437 

Chapter  XX. 

Carhjle.  Works,  Ashburton  ed.,  17  vols.;  People's  ed.,  37  vols.; 
Centenary  ed.,  30  vols.  Sartor  Resartus,  and  Heroes  and  Hero- 
Worship,  each  in  A.  P.  S.;  the  same,  also  French  Revolution  (3  vols.), 
and  Past  and  Present  in  Temple  C.  Essay  on  Burns  in  Lake  E.  C. 
Life,  by  Froude.  See  also  Letters  and  Reminiscences.  Essays  ];y 
Lowell,  Harrison,  Brownell. 

Carlyle's  style  cannot  be  studied  with  any  profit  as  a  model,  Ijut 
it  is  interesting  as  revealing  the  rugged  character  of  the  man.  Find 
rhythmical  and  imaginative  passages.  Do  you  think  Carlyle  could 
have  written  poetry?  What  is  his  estimate  of  Burns?  Could  you 
possibly  charge  hini  with  Scotch  prejudice?  What  is  his  estimate 
of  Johnson?  What  does  the  word  "hero"  mean  with  him?  Who 
axe  some  of  liis  representative  heroes?  What  would  you  suppose 
to  be  his  attitude  toward  slavery?  How  far  is  his  historical  method 
like  Macaulay's?  With  what  foreign  race  would  he  most  easily 
affiliate? 

Ruskin.  Standard  edition  of  works — the  Brant  wood — ed.  by 
Norton.  Sesame  and  Lilies  (in  Engl.  R.,  etc.)  is  the  best  short  work 
for  reading.  See  also  Vida  Scudder's  Introduction  to  the  Writings, 
with  selections;  and  selections  in  Little  Masterpieces  series.  Life 
by  W.  G.  Collingwood.  See  also  the  autobiography,  Prseterita,  and 
the  Letters  of  Ruskin  (Norton).  Essays  by  Harrison,  Saintsbury, 
Brownell,  etc. 

Read  the  third  lecture  of  the  same  series  (The  Mystery  of 
Life  and  the  Arts,  added  1869)  and  formulate  as  precisely  as 
possible  Ruskin's  ethical  beliefs.  Examine  any  passage  of  his 
work  in  detail  and  determine  the  various  rhetorical  elements  that 
contribute  to  its  beauty.  Is  it  clear?  Is  it  overwrought?  Is 
it  better  characterized  as  beautiful  or  as  sublime?  Famous 
"  purple  patches"  are  the  description  of  Turner's  Slave  Ship, 
Modern  Painters,  Part  II.,  Vol.  II.,  Section  V.,  chap,  iii.,  39;  The 
Mountain  Gloom  and  The  Mountain  Glory,  Part  V.,  Vol.  IV.,  chap. 
xix.  and  xx.;  Calais  Tower,  Part  V.,  I.,  2;  The  Roman  Campagna, 
Preface  to  Second  edition;  St.  Mark's,  Stones  of  Venice,  II.,  iv. 

Newman.  Selections  from  Prose  Writings,  ed.  by  Gates,  with 
introductory  essay,  in  Engl.  R.  Life,  by  R.  H.  Hutton;  by  J.  H.  Jen- 
nings; by  Wm.  Barry.  E.ssays  by  Hutton,  Church,  Gates,  W. 
Meynell.     The  Oxford  Movement,  by  R.  W.  Church. 

Suggested  Reading.  The  Site  of  a  University,  in  Historical 
Sketches,  1854,     Im  wha.^  way  does  Newman  ally  himself  with  the 


438  APPENDIX 

Romantic  movement  of  the  nineteenth  century  ?  In  wliat  respect 
does  he  stand  apart  from  it? 

Arnold  (Prose).  Selections  in  Engl.  R.  E.ssays  by  Hutton, 
F.  Harrison,  Gates,  Brownell.  Perhaps  the  best  of  Arnold's  essays 
f(jr  introductory  reading  is  that  on  The  Study  of  Poetry  prefixed  to 
Ward's  English  Poets.  An  outline  of  that  essay  will  give  an  excellent 
idea  of  Arnold's  clearness  of  method.  Compare  the  chances  of 
Arnold  with  those  of  Ruskin  for  reaching  a  large  class  of  readers. 
Does  his  prose  have  many  of  the  qualities  of  the  highest  literature? 

Huxley.  Selections  in  the  several  volumes  of  Little  Master- 
pieces of  Science.  Life  and  Letters,  by  Leonard  Huxley.  Read 
the  brief  Autobiography  in  the  first  volume  of  his  collected  works; 
al.so  the  Address  on  .\  Liberal  Education  (vol.  iii.,  or  Genung's 
Rhetorical  .\naly.sis,  or  Little  Masterpieces  of  Science — Mind). 

Chapter  XXL 

Rossetli.  Collected  Works,  2  vols.  The  Rossettis,  by  E.  L.  Gary. 
The  .Esthetic  Movement  in  England,  by  W.  Hamilton.  Essays  by 
Swinburne,  Pater,  Mabie,  and  Theodore  Watts.  History  of  the  Pre- 
Raphaelite  Movement,  by  P.  H.  Bate. 

Morn'f.  Poetical  Works,  11  vols.  Selections  in  Stedman,  and 
Page.  Life,  by  J.  W.  Mackail,  2  vols.;  by  E.  L.  Gary.  Essays  by 
Swinburne,  Saintsbury,  Sharp. 

Swinburne.  Collected  Works,  12  vols.  Selections,  in  B.  L.  S. 
Essays  by  Gos.se  (Century  Magazine,  May  1902),  Saintsbury,  T. 
Wratislaw. 

Paler.  Selections  from  writings  in  Engl.  R.  A  personal  sketch 
by  E.  Gosse,  Contemporary  Review,  December,  1894.  Essays  by 
Lionel  Johnson,  Geo.  Saintsbury,  Arthur  Symonds,  and  E.  E.  Hale 
(in  Engl.   R.  above). 

Stevenson.  Works,  including  Letters,  Thistle  Ed.,  24  vols. 
Biographical  ed.  in  course  of  publi(;ation.  Life,  by  G.  Balfour,  2  vols. 
Es.says,  by  H.  James,  J.  J.  Chapman,  A.  H.  Japp.  Treasure  Island 
in  Lake  E.  C.  Among  his  characteristic  essays  are  .^s  Triplex,  .\n 
Apology  for  Idlers,  and  Thoreau.  Among  his  best  short  stories  are 
Olalla,  The  Beach  of  Falese,  Providence  and  the  Guitar,  The  Pa- 
vilion on  the  Links,  The  Sire  de  Maletroit's  Door,  and  A  Lodging 
for  a  Night. 


GENERAL   REVIEW   QUESTIONS  439 

3.     GENERAL  REVIEW  QUESTIONS. 
Old  English  Period   (Introduction  and  Chapters  I.  and  II.). 

Whence  comes  the  name  "England"?  In  distinction  from  it, 
what  is  the  proper  use  of  the  name  " Britain"?  Of  "Great  Britain"? 
Who  were  the  Celts?  To  what  group  of  languages  does  English 
belong?  What  dialects  of  English  may  be  distinguished?  From 
which  is  modern  Literary  English  descended?  What  two  events 
in  English  history  were  accompanied  by  marked  changes  in  the 
language?  What  was  the  nature  of  these  changes?  (See  Appendix 
A.  2).  What  special  influences  added  the  Latin  element?  What 
is  the  character  of  the  language  to-day? 

What  name  do  we  give  to  the  early  period?  Where  was  litera- 
ture first  cultivated?  What  can  you  tell  of  the  origin  of  Beowulf? 
Describe  its  form.  What  does  it  reveal  of  the  character  and  con- 
ditions of  the  people?  What  new  element  came  into  the  literature 
with  Csedmon?  Name  other  writers  of  Csedmon's  time.  In  what 
dialect  are  their  writings  preserved?  What  general  difference  is 
there  between  the  early  literature  of  the  North  and  that  of  the 
South?     Who  was  most  prominent  in  the  latter? 

Middle  English  Period  (Chapters  III.  to  VI.). 

What  is  meant  by  the  "  Romance  influence ' '  which  was  felt  in 
England  through  the  Middle  Ages?  What  particular  legends  were 
then  the  staple  themes  of  imaginative  literature  ?  Was  English 
much   written? 

What  long  poem  marks  a  revival  of  English?  What  romances 
of  possibly  native  origin  were  then  written? 

What  new  spirit  was  manifest  in  the  fourteenth  century  ?  Did 
literature  benefit?  Name  several  anonymous  poems  of  merit  ? 
What  prose  work  of  doubtful  authorship  appeared?  How  docs  it 
differ  from  the  prose  that  went  before?  Name  another  very  im- 
p)ortant  contribution  to  English  prose  at  this  time.  What  religious 
poet  belongs  to  this  period?  What  learned  poet?  What  poet  of 
great  genius?  Compare  the  work  of  Chaucer  carefully  with  all 
that  had  gone  before  in  order  to  realize  how  much  he  added.  In 
what  various  ways  did  he  make  literature  broader  ?  Is  the  nature 
element  in  his  poetry  a  new  one?  The  element  of  humor?  What, 
in  a  word,  is  the  greatest  element?  What  was  his  contribution  to 
poetic  form? 

Did  Chaucer's  successors  maintain  his  standards?  What  kind 
of  literature  throve  in  the  fifteenth  century?      Distinguish  between 


440  APPENDIX 

ilirac-l(>  Plays  and  Moralities.  What  chiefly  makes  their  history 
interesting?  What  event  of  great  literary  signifieanc<'  marked  the 
dose  of  tlie  fifteenth  et^ntury?  What  book  of  importance  was 
produced  then?  What  is  its  importance?  Where  was  poetry 
chiefly  cultivated  at  the  beginning  of  the  sixteenth  century,  and  by 
whom?      Why  is  Skeiton  remembered? 

Modern  English  Pkkiod,  First  Division  (Chapters  VII.  to  XI.). 

The  years  15.57,  1558  (Chapter  VIII.)  are  significant  in  literature, 
but  what  good  rea.sons  are  there  (historical,  linguistic,  and  literary) 
for  going  back  fifty  years  or  more  for  the  beginning  of  the  modern 
era?  What  was  the  Renaissance?  The  Reformation?  Why  is 
the  special  importance  of  More's  Utopia  to  English  literature  less 
than  its  general  importance?  What  was  probably  the  most  impor- 
tant literary  event  of  Henry  VIII. 's  reign?  Was  it  intended  to  have 
a  literary  significance?  Who  was  Latimer?  What  prose  writers 
had  literary  aims?  What  poets?  What  foreign  influence  did  these 
latter  introduce?  What  did  they  add  to  what  Chaucer  had  already 
done  for  the  form  of  verse? 

Why  are  the  dates  1557  and  1558  of  particular  significance  to 
English  literature?  What  great  poet  was  a  boy  at  the  time  of  Queen 
Elizabeth's  accession?  What  great  one  was  born  not  long  after- 
ward? What  were  the  characteristics  of  the  age?  What  three  or 
four  writers  gave  lu.stre  to  it,  and  what  was  the  special  contribution 
of  each?  Which  was  of  the  greatest  significance  aesthetically? 
Which  .socially?  Which  intellectually?  What  lesser  writer  incar- 
nates the  spirit  of  the  age?  In  what  literary  achievement  did  he 
share?     What  can  you  say  of  Elizabethan    lyric    poetry  generally?- 

Sketch  the  rise  of  the  drama.  What  was  Marlowe's  service? 
What  is  there  about  Shakespeare's  life  that  seems  to  make  his  achieve- 
ment the  more  remarkable?  Wherein  do  his  dramas  transcend  all 
that  had  preceded?  How  are  they  best  characterized  in  a  short 
phrase?  What  imaginative  excesses  or  defects  do  they  betray? 
What  is  meant  by  Shakespeare's  "universality"?  How  does  Jonson 
differ-  from  Shakespeare?  Name  other  conspicuous  dramatists 
of  the  time. 

Was  the  prose  of  the  time  highly  imaginative?  Define  "Eu- 
phuism." Explain  its  origin.  What  great  churchman  wrote  at 
this  time?  What  great  philosopher  and  statesman?  What  were 
"the  general  characteristics  of  prose  style?  What  two  prose  works 
of  the  period  have  survived  as  living  books? 


GENERAL   REVIEW  QUESTIONS  441 

Wliy  is  the  end  of  the  sixteenth  century  not  a  good  dividing 
point  in  literature?  What  writer's  death  gives  it  some  importance 
as  such?  What  could  be  said  in  favor  of  1603?  1616?  1625-26? 
1637?  What  is  meant  by  the  "Jacobean  period"?  Why  is  it 
both  convenient  and  proper  to  include  it  as  a  part  of  the  EUzabethan 
age?  What  great  conflict  marked  the  Caroline  period?  What  was 
the  effect  upon  imagination?  Upon  moral  earnestness?  Upon 
the  drama?  Upon  lyric  poetry?  Did  the  latter  degenerate? 
What  is  a  "conceit"?  Who  was  John  Donne?  Describe  the  two 
classes  of  Caroline  poets.  Which  particular  poet  is  best  remembered 
to-day,  and  why?  What  is  the  character  of  Cowley's  poetry,  and 
what  its  service?  Is  the  prose  of  the  period  important?  How 
wide  is  its  range?  What  of  its  form?  What  sets  Milton  apart  from 
most  of  the  writers  of  the  time?  Has  his  work  any  Elizabethan 
characteristics?  Spontaneity?  Universality?  Human  interest? 
What  are  its  special  characteristics  and  how  are  they  allied  to  the 
Puritan  spirit? 

Modern  English  Period,  Second  Division  (Chapters  XII.  to  XV.). 

What  is  meant  by  the  Restoration?  Had  it  any  influence  in 
restoring  earlier  literary  conditions,  or  only  in  changing  the  condi- 
tions? What  condition  of  social  life  does  the  Restoration  drama 
reflect?  What  rhymester  and  what  diarist  are  to  be  closely  con- 
nected with  the  political  changes?  Why  is  Paradise  Lost  not 
properly  a  poem  of  this  period?  What  great  prose  writer  of  this 
generation  also  really  represents  the  preceding?  Why  should  he 
not  have  been  touched  by  the  new  fashions?  Compare  and  con- 
trast his  great  work  with  Milton's  epic.  Who  was  the  great  Restora- 
tion writer  proper?  How  voluminous  is  his  work?  How  varied 
in  form  and  in  spirit?  What  particular  foreign  influence  does  he 
reflect?  How  far  would  it  be  true  to  say  that  literature  in  this 
period  shifted  back  from  the  country  to  the  town  and  court?  What 
part  does  nature  play  in  it?  What  species  of  literature,  of  which 
we  have  heard  little  hitherto,  came  into  prominence?  What  definite 
advance  was  made  in  prose?     Was  it  wholly  a  change  for  the  better? 

What  advance,  or  slow  recovery  rather,  in  social  morality  was 
made  in  the  eighteenth  century?  Was  it  directed  by  religious 
enthusiasm  or  cold  reason?  What  kind  of  social  life  accompanied 
it?  What  turn  did  all  tliLs  give  to  literature?  Who  possessed 
the  keenest  mind  of  tlu;  age  and  became  its  great  satirist?  What 
unpleasant  aspects  of  the  age  ju-e  thus  disclosed?  What  writers 
reflected  best  the  better  spirit  of  the  time?      How  did  they  go  about 


442  APPENDIX 

their  mission?  Wtiat  new  power  in  literature  did  they  virtually 
establish?  What  was  their  service  to  prose  form?  What  in  general 
can  you  say  of  the  poetry  of  the  time?  What  in  particular  of 
Pope's — of  its  imaginativeness,  didacticism,  conventionality,  wit, 
brilliance,  finish?  Define  "Classicism"  as  applied  to  this  period. 
Why  may  the  age  aptly  be  called  "Augustan"? 

What  is  the  difference  between  a  novel  and  a  romance?  Name 
some  early  English  romances.  What  steps  toward  the  novel  had 
been  taken  in  the  seventeenth  century?  What  additional  steps, 
were  taken  by  Addison  and  Steele?  Is  there  any  connection  between 
the  rise  of  this  form  and  the  decay  of  the  drama?  What  great 
classic  of  the  early  eighteenth  century  comes  near  being  a  novel, 
and  in  what  does  it  excel?  Just  when  and  with  what  book  was  the 
novel  proper  born?  By  what  greater  successors  was  this  book 
speedily  followed?  What  drawbacks  do  they  possess  from  the 
point  of  view  of  modem  taste?  Who  was  probably  the  master 
novelist  of  the  period?  Who  the  most  eccentric  ?  What  element 
of  degeneracy  is  found  in  the  latter? 

Whose  was  the  real  dominating  influence  in  the  middle  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  and  how  did  he  exercise  his  influence?  De- 
scribe the  downfall  of  literary  patronage.  What  was  the  Dictator's 
attitude  toward  classicism  and  conventionality?  Was  he  a  poet? 
a  novelist?  an  essayist?  a  philosopher?  What  of  his  prose  style  ? 
What  other  great  miscellaneous  writer  followed  Jhim  closely?  Did 
he  excel  him  in  anything?  What  otlier  wTiters  helped  to  make  the 
eighteenth  century  famous  for  its  prose?  What  writer  toward  the 
end  of  the  century  further  establishes  its  character  as  an  age  of 
"prose  and  reason"?  How  far  was  Burke  a  conservative?  What 
evidence  of  change  is  to  be  seen  in  his  work?  What  was  the 
"romantic  revival"?  Trace  it  in  fiction;  in  poetry.  In  whose 
pwetry  did  the  new  spirit  first  conspicuously  appear?  Who  were 
the  "melancholy"  poets  of  the  middle  of  the  century,  and  what 
was  the  greatest  poem?  What  two  or  three  literary  events  in  the 
seventh  decade  accelerated  the  romantic  revival?  What  four  im- 
portant poets  diversely  stood  for  it?  Describe  Cowper's  attitude 
towards  romanticism.  Would  it  be  right  to  speak  of  Bums  as 
having  consciously  taken  any  attitude  towards  this  revival?  How 
then  did  Burns  contribute  to  it? 

Review  the  literary  achievements  of  the  eighteenth  century. 
What  four  poems  (of  Pope,  Gray,  Goldsmith,  and  Bums)  stand  out, 
as  classics?  What  great  translation  was  made?  What  monuments 
of  scholarship  (by  Johnson  and  Gibbon)  and  what  model  of  elo- 


GENERAL   REVIEW   QUESTIONS  443 

quence  (by  Burke)  were  bequeathed?  What  prose  classics  (by 
Addison,  Defoe,  Swift,  Johnson,  and  Goldsmith)  are  still  very  widely 
read  ? 

Modern  English  Period,  Third  Division. 
(Chapters  XVI.  to  XXI.) 

What  is  meant  by  the  passing  of  the  Augustan  era?  Was  it 
synonymous  with  the  triumph  of  Romanticism?  What  is  Roman- 
ticism, or  what  are  some  of  its  features?  What  makes  the  year  1798 
memorable  in  literature?  What  was  Wordsworth's  poetic  creed? 
How  did  Coleridge's  differ?  Which  was  the  greater  poet,  and  why? 
Whose  influence  upon  later  poets  is  the  more  obvious?  Who  wrote 
the  earUest  romantic  poetry  of  the  nineteenth  century  that  became 
popular?  Name  several  minor  popular  poets.  What  poet  of  this 
great  group  attained  to  the  widest  and  most  sensational  fame? 
Why?  What  other  poet  is  to  be  linked  with  him  as  distinctly 
"revolutionary"?  What  forms  did  their  revolt  take?  What  were 
the  ideals  of  the  latter?  W^hich  of  the  two  was  the  greater  personal 
force?  Which  the  higher  poet  in  the  stricter  sense  of  the  word? 
Which  has  had  the  greater  influence  on  succeeding  poetry?  What 
younger  poet  than  any  of  these  came  to  be  most  influential  in  deter- 
mining the  direction  that  later  nineteenth  century  poetry  was  to 
take?     What  was  his  particular  poetic  creed? 

How  far  does  the  fiction  of  the  early  nineteenth  century  show 
traces  of  the  realism  of  the  eighteenth,  and  what  really  great  novelist 
belongs  to  this  school?  What  still  greater  writer  of  fiction,  at  least 
in  the  common  judgment,  stands  with  the  poets  of  the  romantic 
triumph?  Show  how  his  works  may  be  called  almost  equally  well 
romances  or  novels.  In  what  does  their  romanticism  consist? 
What  term  most  exactly  defines  them?  Can  their  influence  be 
easily  traced  in  the  subsequent  fiction  of  both  England  and  America? 

Can  the  miscellaneous  prose  of  the  early  nineteenth  century  be 
described  by  any  less  general  term  than  "motley"?  What  form  of 
prose  activity  somewhat  similar  to  one  of  a  hundi-ed  years  before 
is  to  be  noted?  What  is  there  about  the  prose  that  is  "new" — ■ 
different  from  that  of  the  eighteenth  century?  Is  it  not  really 
something  old?  How  is  it  allied  to  romanticism?  Who  was  the 
unique  semi-classicist?  The  liistorical  essayist?  Which  had  the 
most  erratic  style?  Which  the  most  ornate  and  rhythmical? 
Wliich  the  clearest? 

What  great  social  movements  mark  the  nineteenth  century  as 
a  whole?     Are  they  reflected  in  the  literature  of  the  Victorian  age? 


444  APPENDIX 

How  does  Tennyson  reflect  them?  How  far  is  he  the  spokesman  of 
the  lower  classes?  Of  the  university  scholars  and  theologians? 
Of  the  intelligent  middle  classes?  What  does  he  owe  to  Words- 
worth? To  Keats?  To  Malory?  Is  Browning  so  distinctly 
English?  Are  his  themes  of  more  nearly  universal  interest?  Arc 
they  so  popular?  Is  he  to  be  closely  compared  with  any  forerunner 
or  contemporary?  What  intellectual  tendency  of  the  time  docs 
he  represent?  In  what  respect  is  his  poetry  a  corrective  for  Ten- 
nyson's, Arnold's,  and  Fitzgerald's?  Who  was  the  academic  poet 
of  the  time?  Was  he  as  versatile  as  Tennyson?  As  tonic  aa  Brown- 
ing? In  what,  if  anything,  does  he  maintain  equality  with  them? 
What  claim  has  Clough  to  inclusion  with  these  poets? 

What  relation  does  the  Victorian  novel  bear  in  general  to  Scott's 
fiction?  To  the  novel  of  the  eighteenth  century?  What  relation 
to  the  actual  conditions  of  its  own  time?  Who  was  the  great  nov- 
elist of  the  humbler  classes?  What  service  did  he  perform,  social 
and  literary?  What  great  novelist  dealt  with  the  life  of  the  upper 
classes?  What  very  different  method  did  he  employ  for  the  eleva- 
tion of  his  fellowmen?  Did  he  specifically  aim  at  that,  or  did  he 
work  more  in  the  spirit  of  an  artist?  In  what  respects  is  he  like 
Fielding?  What  minor  novelists  followed  in  the  steps  of  these  two 
leaders?  What  two  women  novelists  approached  them  in  power, 
and  what  does  each  represent? 

Define  Carlyle's  attitude  toward  the  tendencies  of  his  time. 
Was  his  influence  good — or  may  we  say  that  it  was  morally  good 
though  sometimes  practically  misdirected?  What  of  his  influence 
on  style?  Of  his  greatness  as  a  historian?  How  does  Ruskin  ally 
himself  with  Keats  and  Tennyson?  How  with  Carlyle,  Dickens, 
and  Kingsley?  What  were  his  defects  as  a  critic?  His  merits  as 
a  writer  of  prose?  What  healthful  influence  did  he  exert?  Why 
was  Arnold  a  better  critic  than  Ruskin?  What  different  class  was 
he  most  likely  to  influence?  Is  there  anything  romantic  about  hi.s 
prose?  Name  some  minor  representatives  of  the  activities  of  the 
middle  of  the  century — in  history,  science,  theology,  etc. 

In  what  did  the  mediaevalism  of  Scott,  the  mysticism  of  Cole- 
ridge, the  idealism  of  Shelley,  and  the  aesthetic  and  semi-pagan  creed 
of  Keats  culminate  in  the  later  part  of  the  century,  and  through  what 
intermediate  influences?  What  are  the  good  aspects  of  the  later 
aesthetic  movement?  Who  is  the  mystic  among  the  Pic-llapha'l- 
ites?  Who  the  mediajvafist?  Who  the  ardent  republican  and 
jnastor  lyrist?      Show  that,  with  all  its  wonderful  variety,  there  hjis 


GENERAL   REVIEW   QUESTIONS  445 

been  no  essential  change  in  the  spirit  of  nineteenth  century  poetry. 
How  far  back  must  we  go  to  find  a  like  spirit  and  poetic;  productive- 
ness? How  does  Stevenson's  work  hark  back,  not  only  to  the 
beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century,  but  to  the  very  beginning  of 
English  literature? 


TOPICAL  INDEX. 


THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE. 


141-144,  147,  166,  167,  ISI,  208, 
211,  216,  217,  267-269,  275,  281, 
282,  342,  357,  359,  361,  382,  383. 

"Euphuism,"  128,  129,  137. 

Critical  proso,  81,  214,  268,  274, 
342,  362. 

The  Periodical  Essay,  176-182. 

The  Review,  267-269. 

Alliteration  and  rhyme,  20,  39,  44,    PROSE  FICTION 

47,  151,  162. 
Octosyllabic  couplet,  40,  48,  148,    Romances    (non-metrical),    68-70, 

156,  246,  262.  ^      '       '       '         '87,  94,  191-193,  203,  204,  263- 
Heroic   couplet    (iambic     pentam-    _  266,  318,  376,  384 


History,  vocabulary,  etc.,  12-14, 
19,36,38,39,43,48,58,81,  111, 
133,  220,  392-395. 

Dialects,  13,  25,  26,  31,  71,  81,  229, 
392. 

ENGLISH  VERSE. 


eter),    58,    141,    162,    163,  165, 

184,  187,  190,  210,  218,  224,  226, 

242,  258,  244. 
Blank  verse  (iambic  pentameter), 

84,  101,  102,  126,  151,  162,  183, 

218,  225,  242,  248. 
Ballads,  41,  63,  223,  261,  262,  372, 

375,  377. 
Odes  ("Pindarics,"  etc.),  141,  164, 

219-222. 
The  Sonnet,  83,  95,  107,  149,  236, 

307,  373. 

THE  DRAMA. 

Theatres  and  theatrical  perform- 


Picaresque    Tales,    191,    195,  197, 

201. 
The  "Character,"  181,  193. 
Realism,   159,   191,   193,   195-202, 

260,  265,  317,  318, 321, 327, 329- 

330,  332-333,  334,  335-337,  338- 

340. 
The  Novel,  191-194,  197,  201,  203, 

211,  264,  317  ff. 
The    Historical    Novel,    264-266, 

317,  318,  322,  328,  333,  338. 

EPOCHS,  MOVEMENTS,   ETC. 
French  influence,  35-37,  65,  170, 


1S9. 

ances,  65,  66,  100,  103-i05,  136,  ItaUan  influence,  53,  82-84,  87,  91, 

137,  169.  94. 

Miracle  Plays  and  Moralities,  64-  The  Renaissance,  77-87,  136,  189. 

67,  98,  113,  379.  Puritanism,  135-137,  157-160. 

Interludes,  98.  Classicism,  162,  165,  170,  181,  187, 

Classical    and    Romantic    Drama,  189-190,  210,  218,  219,  221,  232. 

99-103,  111-115,  122-125,  162,  Romanticism,    217-220,    222-224. 

212,  377.  227,  228,  231,  232-235,  239,  241- 

The  "Unities,"  99-102,  162.  246,  252-254,  258,  259,  261,  264- 

Types  and  "Humours,"   66,   101,  266,268,291,335,354,368,383, 

114,  122,  193,  324.  387-388. 

Masques,  124,  148.  The    Tractarian    Movement,    284, 

The  Restoration  Comedy,  157, 162.  313,  315,  333,  359. 

The  Dramatic  Monologue,  301-303.  ^stheticism,  369  fT.,  381. 

Trvrnx  tcxi  r>T>/-\aTP  Nature  in  English  Literature,  21, 

ENGLISH  PROSE.  4j_4_^   g^  ^^  jj2,  119,  120,  166^ 

Development  of,  24,  26-30,  45,  46,  189,  217-220,  225,  226,  229,  230, 

52,  68-70,  80,  128-130,  132,  134,  238,  290,  291,  356-359,  380,  387. 

446 


GENERAL  INDEX. 


Absalom    and   Achitophel,    lOa.  Heuiculf,  17-21.  30,  44,  392. 

Adam  Bede,  338,  339.  Berkeley,  Bishop  George,  403. 

Addison,    Joseph,    176-182,    174,    183,  Berners,       John       Bourchier,       Lord 

187,   189,   190,   193,   194,   211,  216,  (146f-1533),   80. 

277,  328.  liiUe,  Translations,   46,   80,   81,   134, 

Adonaiis.  254,   149,  258,   312.  357,   396-397. 

MUric,  29,  392.  Illaclimore,  Richard  D.,  406. 

.Uneid,  Surrey's,  83,  84.  iUackuood's   Muyazine,   268,   273. 

Akenside,  Mark,  403.  Blair,  Rohert,  403. 

Alastor,  254.  Blake,  William,  227,  55. 

Alchemi.it,  The,  123.  Blessed  Damozel,  The,  370-372. 

Alexander's  Feast,  164.  Boethius,  Alfred's,  27,  52. 

Alfred,   King.    26-28,    12,   24,   30,   31,  Boethius,  Chaucer's,  52. 

38,  52,  213.  392.  Bolingbroke,     Henry    St.     John,    Vis- 

Allegro,  L',   147.  count,  403,   169. 

Alton  Locke,  333.  Book  of  the  Duchesse,  49,  52. 

Amelia,  200.  Borrow,  George,  406. 

Amoretti,   Spenser's,   96.  Boswell,   James,   404,    181,   207,   210, 

Anatomy  of  Melancholy,  133.  216. 

Ancient  Mariner,  Rime   of   the,   239,  Bronte,  Anne,  406,  334,  335. 

241,  21.  Bronte.    Charlotte.   334-337. 

Andromeda,  333.  Bronte,  Emily,  406,  334.  335. 

Annus  Mirubilis,   161.  Brooke,  Lord.     See  Greville. 

Antony  and  Cleoputru,  106,  109,  119,  Browne,   Sir  Thomas,   143,   142,    147, 

162.  166,  181,  217.  275,  357,  359. 

Arbuthnot,  John,  403.  Browne,  William,  400. 

Arcadia,  94,  129,  192.  Browning,     Elizal>eth     Barrett,     306- 

Areopagitica,  146,  368.  308,  298,  369. 

Argument   arjainst   Aholishimj    Chris-  Browning.  Robert,  296-306,  276.  289, 

tianity,  173,   186.  307,  309,  325,  368. 

Arnold,  Sir  Edwin,  407.  Brunanburh  Poem,  The,  29,  30. 

Arnold,    Matthew,    309-315,    361-364,  Brut,  Layamon's,   38,   39. 

70,    154,    235,    239,   243,    251,   284,  Buckhurst,  Lord.     See  Sackville. 

316,  352,  366,  368,  380.  Buckle,   Henry  Thomas.  406. 

Arthurian    Legends.    37.    39.    43,    69,  Bulwer-Lytton.      See   Lytton. 

92,   151,  291,  293,  375.  Bunyan,  John,  157-160,  69,  117,  1.34, 

Ascham,  Roger,  81,  94,  128.  167,    193,    194. 

Astraa  Redux,  161.  Burke,    Edmund,    213-217,    142.    207, 

Astrophel  and  Stella,  94,  110.  210,  267,  281,  .392. 

Atalanta  in  Calydon,  377.  Burney,   Frances,  404.  203.   260. 

Aurora  Leigh,  307.  Burns,  Robert.  227-231,  13,  210,  238, 

Austen,  Jane,  260-261,  317.  333.  335.  242,  243,  .343,  .392. 

Bacon.  Francis.  131-133,  52,  86,  147,  Burton,   Robert,   133. 

157,   166,  286.  Butler,   Bishop  .Joseph,  403. 

Bailey.   Philip  James,  405.  Butler,  Samuel,  156. 

Ballads,  41,  63,  223,  261.  Byron,    George    Gordon.    I^ord.    245- 

Barnes,  William.  405,  392.  253,  234,  244,   255.   256,  262,  268, 

Barrie.  Mr.  J.  M.   (b.  1860),  21.  284,  286,  297,  317. 

Battle  of  Maiden,  29.  Caedmon,  22-23,   17.  24,  31.  392. 

Battle  of  the  Books,  171.  363.  Caleb   Williams,  204. 

Beaoonsfield.  Viscount.     See  Disraeli.  Campaign,  The,  178.  182. 

Btattie,    James.   403.  Campbell.  Thomas,   244,   246. 

Beaumont.   Francis,   125  127.  Campion.  Thomas.  400. 

Beckford.  William.  404.  204.  Canterbury  Tales.  54-60.  51.  63. 

Beddoes.  Thomas  Lovell.  404.  Carew.  Thomas,  401.  139. 

Bede.   the  Venerable.   23,  27.  .392.  Carlyle.   Thomas,    343-351.    240.    241, 

Beygar's   Opera,   182.  242,  279.   284,   291.  .308,  333,  354, 

Be'hn.  Mrs.  Aphra,  192.  .355,  360.   362,  363,  364,  365.  369, 

Bentham.   Jeremv.   _42.  374.  383. 

Bentley,   Ricb:ird.  402,   187.  Castle  of  Indolence,  218,  219. 

447 


448 


INDEX 


Cat/tie  of  O Irani'),  'M4. 

Vato,  17». 

Caxtoii,  William,  08,  71,   1!>2,  392, 

Chanson  de  Roland,  35,  36. 

Chapman,  George,  400.  07.   137,  301. 

Chatterton,   Thomas,   223,   258. 

Chaucer,  Geoffrey,  48-61.  14,  21,  02, 
63,  71,  78.  81,  84,  119,  141,  104, 
189,  190    262,  375,  392,  407. 

CheBterfleld,  Philip  Dormer  Stan- 
hope, Earl  of,  404,  208,  216. 

Cheater  I'layit,  The,  60,  67. 

Chevy  Chace,  63. 

Childe  Harold.  240,  247,  249,  250. 

Chrintabcl,  239,  240,  242,  243,  202. 

Chrontelc,  Anylo-Huxon,  28,  29,  38, 
213,  392. 

Churchill,  Charles,  403. 

Clbber,   Colley,   186. 

Citizen  of  the  World,  209. 

Clarendon,  Edward  Hyde,  Earl  of, 
402,  142,  213. 

ClarisHU,  198. 

dcattfLCHs    44 

Cloister  and  the  Hearth,  The,  332. 

Cloud,  The,  255. 

Clough,   Arthur   Hugh,   31o-316,   312. 

Cnut  the  Dane,  31. 

Coleridge,  Samuel  Taylor,  239-243, 
227,  233-2.35.  252,  256,  260,  202, 
269,  273,  274,  284,  289,  .348,  369, 
388,  392. 

Collier,  Jeremy,  402,  169. 

Collins.   Wilkie,  406. 

Collins,  William,  219.  220. 

Compleint   to  Hts  Purse,  50. 

Complete  Angler,  The,  144. 

ComuH,  147.  148,  125,  151. 

Confessio  Aniantis,  48. 

Confessions  of  an  English  Opium- 
Eater    273 

Congreve,  William,  402,  157,  178, 
212. 

Cotter's  Saturday  Mght,  228,  230. 

Coventry  Plays,  The,  66. 

Coverdale,  Miles  (1488-1568),  80. 

Cowley,  Abraham.  141,  161,  165,  166, 
221,  267.  282,  280. 

Cowper,  William,  224-220,  227,  238, 
243,   245,   3.56,   .361. 

Crabbe,  George,  220,  232,  200. 

Cranford,  334. 

Cranmer,    Thomas     (1489-1550).    80. 

Crashaw.  Richard,  138,  1.39,  141. 

Crist,  17,   24. 

Crossing  the  Bar,  21,  289. 

"Cuckoo   Song."   42. 

Culture  and  Anarchy,  301  ff. 

Cursor  Muvdi,  40,  392. 

Cynewulf    (the  poet),   24,   31.  392. 

Dance  of  the  Seven  Deadly  Sins.  72. 

Daniel,   Samuel,  400. 

Daniel  Deronda,  339. 

I>arley.  George,  404. 

Darwin.  Charles  Kol>ert,  400.  285, 
305,   3(J0. 

Davenant.  Sir  William,  401. 

David  Copperfield,  32e-323,  328. 


Decline  and  Fall  of  the  Roman  Em- 
pire, 213. 
Defence  of  Gucncvere,   324-325,   381. 
Defence  of  Poesy,  94,  129. 
Defoe,     Daniel,     194-197,     171,     170, 

199,  201,  206. 
Dekker,  Thomas,  401. 
Denham.  Sir  John,  401,  141. 
Door's  Lament,  17. 
De    Quincey,    Thomas,    272-276,    235. 

207,   268,  277,  279,  281,   282,   344, 

357    359 
niserte'd  Village,  The,  210. 
l>lckens,   Charles,   319-.325,   284,   320. 

328,  331,  .332,  334,  335,  344. 
Disraeli,   Benjamin,   317-318,  302. 
Doljell,  Sydney,  405. 
Don  Juan,  247-250. 
Donne,  John,  137,  1.38,  144,  400. 
Douglas,    Gawaln    (1474  7-1522),    71. 
Dramatis  Persona;,  297.  301. 
iJrapier's  Letters,  The,  174. 
Drayton,  Michael,  400,  97. 
Dream  of  the  Rood,  17. 
Dryden,   John.    101-167.   53,    7(t,    137, 

141,157,    169-171,    178,    179,    185, 

206,   211,  216,   243,   245,   262,  267, 

282,  284,  286,  311,  361.  392. 
Duchess  of  Malfl,  The,  126,  127. 
Dunbar,  William,  71,  72,  392. 
Dunciad,  The,  185-186. 
Earthly  Paradise,  The,  375. 
Ecclesiastical  Polity,  130. 
Edgeworth,  Maria,  404,  260,  334. 
Edinburgh     Review,     267-269,      246.        , 

279.  ■ 

Elegy,  Gray's,  220-222,  210. 
Elcne,  24. 

•Eliot,   George,"  337-341,  334. 
Empedocles  on  Etna,  310. 
Endymion,  258. 
England's  Helicon,  97. 
English  liards  and  Scotch  Reviewers, 

246. 
Enoch  Arden,  288,  292. 
Epilogue,  306. 
Epistles,  Pope's,  186. 
Epithalamion,  90. 
Essay  of  Dramatic  Poesy,  106. 
Essay  on  Criticism,  184. 
Essay  on  Man,  180. 
Essays  in  Criticism,  362. 
Essays  of  Elia,  270-272. 
Etherege,    Sir   (Jeorge,   402,    157. 
Euphues,  128.  192. 
Evans,     Mary     Ann      (Mrs.      Cross, 

••(ieorge   Eliot"),    .337-341.  3.34. 
Eve  of  St.  Agnes,  258,  2.59. 
Evelina,  203. 
Evelyn,  .John.  402.  170. 
Everyman,  00.  07. 
Every  Man  in  his  Humour,  121. 
Excursion,  The,  234.  2.".0,  268. 
Exeter  Book,  17. 
Exodus,  23. 
Fables,  Dryden's    104. 
Faerie  Queene,   91-94,   21,    160,  257, 

288. 


INDEX 


449 


Faithful  Shepherdess,  The,   125,   148. 
Farquhar,  George,  402. 
Fei-gusson,   Robert    (1750-1774),   228. 
Fielding,    Henry,    190-201,    203,    206, 

260,  330. 
Fingal,  223. 

Finnsbttru.  The  Fight  at,  22. 
Fitzgerald,  Edward,   308-309. 
Fletcher,  Giles,  400. 
Fletcher,  John,  125-127,  148. 
Fletcher,  Phineas,  400_ 
Ford,  John,  401. 
Forsaken  Merman,  The,  311-312. 
Four  PP,  The,  98. 
Foxe,  John    (1516-1587),   87,   159. 
Francis,  Sir  Philip,  404. 
Frederick  the  Great,  345. 
Freeman,     Edward     Augustus,     406, 

343,   364. 
French    Revolution,    343,    344,    347- 

348. 
Froissart,  Lord  Berners's,  80. 
Froude,    James    Anthony,    364,    333, 

343. 
Fuller,   Thomas,   402,    142.   270,   275. 
Oammer     Ourton's     \eedlc,    98,     99, 

100. 
Gascoigne,  George,  400. 
Gaslsell,  Mrs.    (Elizabeth  Stevenson), 

406,  334,  335. 
Oawayne  and   the  Green  Knight,  43, 

44. 
Gav,  John,  403,   182,   183. 
Gebir,  276. 
Genesis  and  Exodus,  the  Caedmonian, 

23. 
Geoffrey    of  Monmouth,    37. 
Gibbon,   Edward,  213,   207,   210,  267, 

281,  395. 
Goblin  Market,  369. 
Godwin,  William,  404,  204.  216,  252, 

253. 
Goldsmith,  Oliver,  209-212,  207,  208, 

213,    224,    267. 
Gorboduc.  99,  100,  102. 
Gower,   John,  48. 
Grace  Abounding,  158,   159. 
Grav.    Thomas,    220-222,    204,    210, 

213. 
Green,  John   Richard,  406. 
Greene,  Robert,  400.   100,  106. 
Gulliver's  Travels,  174,  171,  194. 
Guy  Mannering,  264,  265. 
Hakluyt,  Richard,  401,  128. 
Ilallam,   Henry,  405,  294. 
Hamlet,  109,  111,  116,  117,  119. 
Hardy,   Mr.   Thomas    (b.    1840),  388. 
Havelok  the  Dane,  40,  41. 
Hawker,  Robert  Stephen,  405. 
Hazlitt,   William,  405,  94,  268. 
Henley,  William  Ernest,  407. 
Henry    Esmond,    326-328,    330,    331, 

334. 
Henry'son,  Robert   (14307-1506?),  71. 
Herbert,  George,  401,   138,   139,   144. 
Hero  and  Leander,  101,  107. 
Heroes  and  Hero-Worship,  344,  349- 

350. 


Ilerrick,  Robert,  130-141,  276. 
Hesperidcs,   140,  276. 
Hewlett,  Mr.   Maurice,   388. 
Heywood,    John     (1497  7-1580  V),    98. 
Hey  wood,  Thomas,  401. 
Hind  and  the  Panther,  The,  163. 
Historia  Britonum,  37. 
Hobbes,  Thomas,  402,  142. 
Iloccleve,   Thomas,   62.   51. 
Holinshed,   Raphael    (d.   1580  7),   128, 

109. 
Holy  Living  and  Holy  Dying,  142. 
Homer,     Chapman's,     97,     137,     258, 

361. 
Homer,    Pope's,    183,     185,     187-188, 

206,  351,  361. 
Hood  Thomas,  404,  285. 
Hooker,   Richard,    130,   52,    144,    357. 
Home,   Richard  Hengist,  405. 
House  of  Life,  372-374. 
House  of  Fame,  51,  53. 
Howell,  James,  402. 
Hudibras,  156. 
Hughes,  Thomas.  300. 
Hume,  David,  403,  213. 
Humphrey  Clinker.  201.  202,  203. 
Hunt,  Leigh,  404,  405,  253,  257,  268. 
Huxley,   Thomas   Henry,   365-367. 
Hyde,   Edward,  402. 
Hypatia,  333. 
Idylls    of    the   Kinq,    287,    288,    291, 

293-294,    295,   375. 
Imaginary     Conversations,     277-278, 

301. 
In  Memoriam,  287,  294-296,  140. 
Interludes,  98. 
Irish  Melodies,  244. 
James    I.    of    Scotland     (1394-1437), 

71. 
James  Lee's  Wife,  301-302. 
Jane  Eyre,  335-337. 
Jefferies,  Richard,  407. 
Jeffrey,   Francis,   405.   267,   268,  279. 

281 
.Johnson,    Dr.    Samuel,    206-210,    121. 
137,   149,   153,   163,   166,   182,  211. 
216,   219,   224,   226,   244,  267,   281, 
350,  392,  395. 
Jonson.   Ben,    121-125,   86,    127,   137, 

148,  162.  163,  193,  324. 
Joseph  Andrews,  100. 
Journal  to  Stella,  174. 
Journal  of  the  Plague  Year,  195. 
Judith,  23. 
Juliana,  24. 
"Junius,"   404,  216. 
Keats,   John,    256-260,   97,    133,    227, 
243,   253,   254,   268,   284,   286,   287, 
289,  297.  369,  378,  381,  388. 
Keble,  John.  404,  285. 
King,  Bishop  Henry. 
King  Horn,  or  Childe  Horn,  40. 
Kinglake,   Alexander,   406. 
Kingsley,  Charles,  333-334,  284,  322, 

360. 
Kingsley,  Henry,  406. 
King's  Quair,  The,  71. 
Kipling,  Mr.  Rudyard  (b.  1865),  388. 


450  INDEX 

Kubla  Khan,  U39,  240,  242.  Mill,  John  Stuart,  406,  388,  365. 

La  Belle  Dame  Sana  Merci,  251).  Mill  on  the  Floss,  The,  338-340. 

Lalta  Rookh,  244.  Mllman,   Henry   Hart,  405. 

L'Alleuro    \-^l.  Milton.   John,    144-154,  23,   117,   125, 

^'^?^>    k^^^^^^Si,    -.^?/-'.?'.    ^S     I^S-  134,   137,   156,   160,   166,   181,    I'JO, 

i\\'   IV^'   Itl'  -"'   -^"^'   -^^'  ^^^'  217,  220,  336,   237,  254,  275!   312, 

344,348,386.                          o-.>  o-c  357,361,368.392. 

''"7^o'"'o8.)^^Kf-'  -^rfi^^'^f/    -.ri'^i"'  Mi><'<=lo  Plays,  64-66.  98,  113,  379. 

'v-H    S7q'  "  Modern  Painters,  353  ff. 

Langland.    or    Langley,    William,    47.  -li":!!!!^,?^,^^!^  ^^^^  ,   „.,..,         .. 

Latimer,   Hugh    (1485V-1555),  80.  Monmouth,   Geoffrey  of   (12th   cent.), 

Luiis  Veneris,  309,  379.  ,,**';           r    ^      ^. 

Layamon,  38    392.  Montagu.   Lady    Mary    Wortley,    403. 

Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel,  243,  262.  Moore,  Thomas,  244,  246. 

Lays  of  Ancient  Rome.  280.  Moralities,    64,    66,    67,    98. 

Leyend  of  Good   Women,  51,  53,   54.  More,    Sir    Thomas    (1478-1535),    80, 

Lever,  Charles,  406.  132. 

Lewis,  Matthew  Gregory,  204.  Morris,    William,    374-376,    70,    132, 

Lives    of    the   Poets,    208,    209,    182,  266,  369,  378,  381,  383. 

281.  Morte  Darthur,  68-70. 
Locke,  John,  402,  157,  242.  Mulock,  Dinah  Maria,  406. 
Locker-Lampson,  Frederick,  405.  Mysteries  of  Udolpho,  204. 
Lockhart,  John  Gibson,  405,  268.  Nash,  Thomas,  401. 
Locksley    Hall,    287,    288,    290,    293,  Heiccomes,  The,  326,  327. 

295.  Newman,   Cardinal  John  Henry,  359- 

Lodge,    Thomas,    401,    96,    100,    129,  361,  284,  333,  364. 

192.  Newton,   Sir   Isaac,  402,  286. 

London,  208.  yut-Brown  Maid,  The,  64. 

London    Magazine,    The,    268,     270,  Oceleve.     See  Hoccleve. 

273,  344.  Odes,  Colllns's,  219. 

Lorna  Boone,  393.  Odes,  Gray's,  220-222. 

Lovelace,  Richard,  401,  139,  140.  Odes,  Keats's,   259. 

Lover,  Samuel,  406.  Oliver  Twist,  321. 

Lycidas,  147,   148,  254,  294,  312.  Omar  Khayyam,  308-309. 

Lydgate,  John,  63.  Orm,  or  Ormln,  39,  392. 

Lyly,  John,  128,  96,  100,  192,  400.  O'Shaughnessy,  Arthur  Edward,  407. 

Lyrical   Ballads,    233-235,    239,    243,  "Ossian,"   223. 

272.  Otway,   Thomas,  402,   157. 

Lytton,      Edward      George,      Bulwer-  Overlmry,    Sir    Thomas    (1581-1613), 

Lytton,  317-319,  322,  327,  335.  193. 

Macaulay,    Thomas    Babington,    278-  Otcl  and  the  Niyhtinqale,  The,  41. 

282,  134,  217,  264,  267,  268,  286,  Painter,    William     (1540  7-1594),    87. 
288,  343,  344,  361,  364,  365,  383.  Palace  of  Pleasure,  87. 

Macbeth,  109,  110,  112,  115,  118.  Paley,   William,  404,  216. 

Mackenzie,  Henry,  404,  203,  230.  Pamela,  198,  199. 

Macpherson,       James        (1736-1796),  Paradise  Lost,  150-154,  23,  156,  160, 

223.  162,  179. 

Maldon,  The  Battle  of,  29.  Paradise  of  Dainty  Devices,  87. 

Malory,  Sir  Thomas,  68-70,  166,  192.  Parlement  of  Foules,  50,  53. 

Mandeville,  Sir  John,  44,  45,  48,  52.  Tarnell,  Thomas,  403. 

Map,  or  Mapes,  Walter,  37.  Passionate  Pilgrim,  The,  96. 

Marius  the  Epicurean,  381.  J'ast   and  Present,  345,   349. 

Marlowe,    Christopher,    100-103,    96,  I'ater,  Walter  Horatio,  381-383,  384, 

106,   107,  113,  122,  141,  190.  385,   386,  388. 

Marmion,   262.  Patmore,    Coventry,    405. 

Marryat,  Captain  Frederick,  405.  Peacock,  Thomas  Love,  405. 

Marston,  John,  401.  Pearl,  The,  44. 

Marvell,  Andrew,  401,   145.  Peele,   George,  400,   100. 

Masques,  Ben  Jonson's,   124,  148.  Pendennis,   326,   327,    329,   330,    331. 

Masslnger,   Philip,  401.  Penseroso,  II,  147. 

Maud.  286,   288,   293,   295.  Pepys.  Samuel,  156,  157,  161,  181. 

Merchant  of   Venice,   108,    109,   112,  Percy,     Thomas     (1729-1811),     223, 

114.  261. 

Meredith,  Mr.  George  (b.  1828),  388.  Phillips,   Mr.    Stephen,   388. 

Middlemarch,  338,  341.  Pha>nix,  The,  17,  24. 

Middleton,  Thomas,  400.  Pickwick  Papers,  320,  321,  322. 

Midsummer  Night's  Dream,  21,   108.  Piers  Plowman,  47. 


INDEX  451 

Pilgrim's    Progress,    159,    160,    174,  125-127,   129,   150,   154,   162,   189, 

192,   193,   351.  190,  201,  206.   208,  212,  240,  251, 

Pippa  Passes,  297,  300-301.  261,  276,  299,  327,  339,  378,  392, 

Pope,    Alexander,    183-190,    165,    171,  395    407 

Hi'  o?l'  o-i*?'  n^^^'  ^}P'  ^^^'  ^^^'  Shelley,  Percy  Bysshe,   252-256,   149, 

J-'J,  245,  284    3ol,  3fal.  219,  247,   258,   260,   284,  287,  289, 

Porter,  Jane,  405.  007    019    oeq    070    070    000 

pJSe'^T^f '•2I3  ^'!il''o%'''  '''•  ShenItoni''wmiam,'4oT2lT- 

Pre-KhaeHteSchooirThe,-369ff.  Shepheardes   Calender,   The,   87,    89, 

Prmc^ess,    The,    287,    292,    293.    295.  g^^J:^^^^    ^.^^^^^   3^.^^,^^^   212. 

Prior,'  Matthew,  402,  182,  243.  g?^  Stoops  to  Conquer,  212. 

Procter,  Bryan  Waller,  404.  S-j'^^'^y'  James,  401. 

Prometheus  inbound,  254,  255.  ^^^S^^'   ^^"^  tiiilip,  94,  89,   110,  129, 

Prothalamton,  90.  ^.^^• 

Quarles,   Francis,  401.  ^^^^.^  Marner,  338,  340-341,  393,  394. 

Queen  Mah,  244.  Skelton,  John,  72-73,  71,  82. 

Kadcliffe,  Mrs.,  404,  204.  Smith,  Adam,  404,  216. 

Italeigh,  Sir  Walter,  401,  86,  89,  91.  Smith,   Sydney,  405,  267. 

Ralph  Roister  Bolster,  99,   100.  Smollett,  Tobias  George,  201-203. 

Rambler,   The,  208.  Sohrab  and  Rustutn,  310,  312-313. 

Kamsay,  Allan,  403,  228,  229,  392.  Sonneteers,   The,  95. 

Rape  of  the  Lock,  184,  188.  190.  Sonnets,  Wyatt's  and  Surrey's,  83. 

Rasselas,  203,  208,  209.  Sonnets,  Sidney's,  95. 

Reade,  Charles,  332,  322.  Sonnets,  Spenser's,  95,  96. 

Reflections    on    the    French    Revolu-  Sonnets,  Shakespeare's,   107,   108. 

tion,  214-216.  Sonnets,  Milton's,  147,   149. 

Religio  Medici,  143.  Sonnets,  Wordsworth's,  234,  236. 

Reliques,  Percy's,  223.  Sonnets,  Mrs.   Browning's,  307. 

Richardson,     Samuel,     197-200,     203,  Sonnets,  Rossetti's,  372-374. 

206.  Sonnets   from    the   Portuguese,    307- 

Riddles,  24,   17.  308. 

Ring   and   the  Book,   The,   298,    302-  Sordello,  297. 

303,  305.  Southey,  Robert,  243,  235,  239,  268, 

Robertson,  William,  403,  213.  273,   276,   277. 

Robin  Hood  Ballads,  41,  63.  Spectator,    The,    177-182,    193,    194, 

Robinson  Crusoe,  195-197,  202.  328. 

Rogers,  Samuel,  404,  246,  352.  Spencer,   Herbert,  365,  338. 

Romola,  338,  341.  Spenser,  Edmund,  89-94,  86,  87,  150, 

Rosalynde,  96,  129,  192.  160,  219,  277,  288. 

Rossettl,     Christina     Georgina,     406,  Steele,     Sir    Richard,     176-182,     174, 

369.  184,  193,  277,  328. 

Rossetti,      Dante     Gabriel,     369-374,  Stephen,  Sir  Leslie  (1832-1904),  388. 

243,  258,  309,  376,  377,  378,  381,  Sterne,   Laurence,  202-203,   133,   207, 

383    388  230    344. 

Rubaiyat,  308-309,  379.  Stevenson,'  Robert     liOuis,     883-386, 

Ruskin,  John,  351-359,  134,  242,  264,  266,  368,  388. 

266,  284,  290,  349,  360,  362,  364,  Stones  of  Venice,  354. 

368,  369,  370,  374.  Suckling,  Sir  John,  401,  139,  140. 

Sackville,    Thomas,    Earl    of    Dorset,  Surrey,   Henry  Howard,  Earl  of,   82- 

and   Lord   Buckhurst    (1536-1608),  84,  86,  101. 

86,  87,  99:  Swift,   Jonathan,    171-178,    169,    183, 

Samson  Agonistes,  147,  151.  185,   186,   189,  190,   194,  203,  211, 

Sartor  Resartus,  343-347.  214,  216,  217,  344,  363,  392. 

Saul,  299,  305.  Swinburne,    Algernon    Charles,    376- 

Scholemaster,  The,  82,  94,  128.  381,    70,    243,   255,    309,   369,   383, 

Scott,  Sir  Walter,  261-266,  204,  234,  388. 

243,  246,  249,  260,   268,  269,   280,  Symonds,  John  Addington,  407. 

284,  286,  317,  341,  343,  351,   354,  Tale  of  a  Tub,  A,  171-173. 

368,  383,  388,  392.  Tale  of  Two  Cities,  A,  322,  325. 

Seafarer,  The,  17.  Task,  The,  225. 

Seasons,  The,  218-219.  Tatler,  The,  111,  179,  194. 

Sentimental  Journey,  202,   203,   230.  Taylor,     Bishop    Jeremy,     142,     143, 

Shaftesbury,  Anthony  Ashley  Cooper,  147,  217,  357. 

Earl  of,  403.  Tempest,  The,  21,  106,  109,  112,  116, 

Shakespeare,    William,    105-121.    21,  120. 

53,    86,    96,    100,    101,    122,    123,  Temple,   Sir  William,  402,  157,   171. 


452 


INDEX 


Tennyson,  Alfred,  Lord,  285-206,  13, 
21,  29.  70,  97,  112,  141,  149,  243, 
248,  266,  284,  297,  298,  801,  306, 
308,  309,  310,  312,  325,  326,  383, 
342,  349,  368,  369,  375,  378,  379, 
383,  388,  392,  895. 

Thackeray,  William  Makepeace,  825- 
332,  201,  260,  261,  265,  308,  319, 
334,  835,  354. 

Thistle  and  the  Rose,  72. 

Thyrnis,  310,  312,  316. 

Thomson,  James  (eighteenth  cen- 
tury), 218,  183,  220,  229,  238, 
286. 

Thomson,  James  (nineteenth  cen- 
tury), 406. 

Tintern  Abbey,  234,  236,  237. 

Tom  Jones,  200,  330. 

Tottel's  Miscellany,  83,  86,  97. 

Tourneur,  Cyril,  401. 

Towneley  Plays,  The,  66. 

Toxophllus,  81. 

Traveller,   The,   210. 

Treasure  Island,  384. 

Tristram  Shandy,  202,  133. 

Troilus  and   Criseyde,   53,   61. 

Trollope,  Anthony,  882-338,  335. 

Tyndale,  William   (d.  1586),  80,  392. 

Udall,    Nicholas,    99. 

Vm  Burial,  143. 

Utopia,  80,   132. 

Vanbrugh,  Sir  John,  402. 

Vanity  Fair,  326,  327. 

Vanity  of  Human  Wishes,  208. 

Vathek,  204. 

Vaughan.   Henry,  401,   188. 

Venus  and  Adonis,  106. 


Vercelli  Book,  The,  17. 

Vicar    of    Wakefield,    203,    210-212, 

389. 
Wace,  37,  38. 
Wakefield  Plays,  The,  66. 
Waller,  Edmund,  401,  141,  161,  165, 

187. 
Walpole,  Horace,  404,  203,  216,  220. 
Walton,  Izaak,  144,  142. 
Wanderer,  The,  17. 
Warton,  Thomas,  403,  213. 
Watson,    Thomas,    400. 
Watson,  Mr.  William  (b.  1858),  388. 
Watts,  Isaac,  403. 
"Waverley,"       and       The     Waverley 

Novels,   263-266,   317. 
Webster,  John,  126,  127. 
Wesley.   John,  403. 
White,  Gilbert,  404,  216. 
Widsith,  22,  17. 
Wilson,  John,  405,  268,  273. 
Windsor  Forest^  184. 
Wishes    to    his    Supposed    Mistress, 

139 
Wither,   George,  400. 
Wordsworth,    William,    233-289,    21, 

112,  141,   149,   166,  222,   226,   241- 

243,  252,  255,  256,  268,  269,   273, 

285,   287,   291,  314,   356,   888. 
Wortley.      See  Montagu. 
Wyatt,  Sir  Thomas,  82,  83,  86. 
Wycherley,    William,    402,    157,    183- 

212. 
Wycllf,  John,  45,  46,  52,  78,  81,  392. 
York  Plays,  The,  66. 
Young,  Edward,  182-183. 


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